Replay – Need For Speed

Need For Speed.gif

For this assignment we had to take a moment from on of our favourite movies and turn it into a GIF animated image which captures the essence of a key scene.

For this I chose the movie Need For Speed which is one of my favourite movies due to it’s automotive subject and since I used to play  the Need For Speed video games. For the GIF as you can see above I used a scene of the iconic one-off Ford Mustang which is used throughout most of the movie. It’s an action driving scene showing the car racing on public streets which sums up most of the movie subject/content.

To create this GIF I sourced the movie scene from YouTube  and then used the online service Giphy  to turn the video into the animated image. This was a simple process by just inserting the video link and then specifying the start time from the video and the duration that the GIF should be. The website will then process this and render the image for you to save.

 

need-for-speed-2

I also created this second GIF for fun using this YouTube video for the movie footage. I think this is somewhat more effective than the first GIF since the scenery and background of the shot stays mainly still while the cars through it.

If you wish to view this assignment you can do so here!

GIF 1 on Giphy

GIF 2 on Giphy

Four Icon Movie

For this 3 star assignment, I had to create four icons using minimalist designs that would show a story or movie that people might know. Then to have people guess what that movie is. So for this project, I didn’t want to make it too easy to guess and decided to pick a movie that I’ve always loved. I figured picking a pretty old movie would make it a little tougher, and wouldn’t be fresh on peoples’ minds to guess. Also, I picked a movie which can be considered a Christmas movie just in the fact that the setting has Christmas in it. That is what the Christmas tree represents in the beginning. Then the movie goes  into non-stop action movie that stars a brave man, guns shooting, and plenty of explosions till the very end.

Some other clues that I can give you are that it is one of the best action movies of all-time, has many quotes, and there are many sequels that came out after this movie. One of the sequels even went into theaters on Valentine’s Day the year it went into movie theaters. Good luck guessing!!

 

Limitless Lucy.

Much like the chipmunk-ify assignment a week or so back, I texted my friend to ask her opinion on which two similar movies to mash together for an all-new-movie poster. She was her typical, kind self and threw out a couple of suggestions, but neither of them clicked with me.

Mean Girls and Clueless are similar in that they have a strong female lead and delve into female interaction and young adult culture, but the overall tones are very different; one is more empowering and positive while the other is drenched with negativity. Plus, Clueless is one of my favorite movies, and I’ve never once compared the two.

Aside from one or two viewings with my mom and knowing a couple classic quotes, I don’t know enough about The Princess Bride to make a strong comparison with any other movie, especially one I saw over five years ago like Stardust.

Long story short, despite my friend’s much appreciated attempts, I was on my own. So many movies with comparable plots and tropes crossed by mind–action-packed car races, international spy thrillers–so I tried to remember movies I’d seen recently, and one immediately popped into my brain: Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman. The general plot is that the main character ingests a new street drug and is able to use 100% of her brain, so she becomes insanely powerful, realizing her full potential as a human being and is able to stop time and make things levitate.

I saw the film with one of my best friends who was visiting me on campus a couple of weeks back. We saw the film via Cheap Seats on campus, and the audience was surprisingly empty (the most packed I’ve ever seen the Cheap Seats audience was a showing of Frozen last semester). My friend and I enjoyed the cinematography and awesome special effects, but the plot was disjointed and the ending unsatisfying and confusing.

A movie often compared with Lucy is 2011’s Limitless with Bradley Cooper. In fact, Lucy and Limitless are often called the male-and-female versions of one another. Again, the plot of Limitless is the main character taking a pill that allows him total brain control and power. Thrilling action ensues.

While the two films are similar plot-wise (dare I say remixes of each other?!), the settings and characters are very different. Lucy has a more feminist, intellectual flair (Scarlett Johansson taking control of and owning every situation she’s placed in without a man or anyone’s help, and Morgan Freeman plays a neuroscientist), while Cooper’s Limitless is more spectacle and arguably easier to follow.

I decided to combine them, regardless of their similarities and differences, into Limitless Lucy. I took Limitless‘s original theatrical release poster as a base, because it’s filled with cool light effects, swirls, and striking colors that are easy to edit, and I edited out Bradley cooper’s smaller form and the subtitle/text.

 

Limitless's original poster

Limitless’s original poster

Then, I added Lucy’s/Scarlett Johansson’s eyes, which are colored a striking blue. The drug the character takes is the same color blue, so the eye shot was a popular marketing image.

As exemplified here.

I debated on how much I wanted to match the eyes/blend the eyes into the background image, because I wanted Scarlett Johansson’s character and her coinciding awesomeness and feminism to stand out rather than be overpowered by Cooper’s male character.

I finally did a little bit of background erasing and opacity to make the skin tone less striking, and then, I put a filter over the whole thing as well as upped the saturation, vibrancy, and contrast to help everything blend together that much more, and the changes enhance the dramatic red tones in Cooper’s face and around Lucy’s eyes. The result came out quite nicely; your eyes are drawn to Cooper and then Lucy’s striking blue irises. I easily found a matching font, size, and subtle inner shadow effect to compliment Limitless‘s text.

Limitless Lucy

Limitless Lucy

Imagine Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson both using 100% of their brains (even though that concept is a scientific myth!) and kicking butt as super humans. I’d buy tickets to see that for sure!

The Divergent Games

I did the Movie Trailer Mashup Assignment worth 4.5 stars.

I dowloaded both the Divergent and Hunger Games trailers from Youtube and imported them into iMovie.

Next, I broke up the trailers into the scenes they featured from the movies, and tried to find similar scenes between the two trailers. I put the similar scenes together and carefully ordered them to make sure a plot line somewhat flowed through the new mashup trailer. I also wanted some of the talking to I made sure to increase the volume on the talking scenes and mute the scenes that did not need their original sounds. I found a royalty free song on Incompetech to add to almost the entire trailer. In the very beginning I simply copied part of the background music from the Divergent trailer and added it to the hunger games scene before bringing in my royalty free track. I kept the black transitions from the original trailers and added in transitions between the title scenes and trailers and the date scene and the trailer. I added in the release date scene for my mashuped movie and created a mashuped logo for my movie trailer.
I picked these two movies because they both take place in a dystopian futuresque world, and both have lead female characters. This is The Divergent Games.

The Divergent Games from Jessica Reingold on Vimeo.

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Emperor’s New Groove in 5 Seconds

For the 5 Second Film assignment worth 4.5 stars, I chose to condense the Emperor’s New Groove in 5 seconds. Originally I thought this assignment was going to be really easy, but then I discovered just how fast 5 seconds go by. Another issue I ran into was that all of the best parts of the movie don’t really make the plot understandable when they are isolated, so what I ended up doing was just trying to convey the basic plot within the 5 seconds. The entire movie wasn’t available on Youtube, but I found the areas of the movie I needed to download. I used Video DownloadHelper on Firefox to download the video clips from Youtube. Then, I imported my clips in iMovie and trimmed them down significantly that when when they were altogether they only added up to 5 seconds long. After that I added in my title and credit sequences. Lastly, I found an instrumental version of the opening song for the Emperor’s New Groove and downloaded that from youtube as well. I trimmed the music down and had it fade down during the 5 second movie sequence. Then I simply “Shared” it as a file and then uploaded it to Youtube!

Video elements:

1. Emperors new groove by Gazoo Junior

2. The Emperor’s New Groove – Stuck in the Ravine by The Mouse Castle

3. The Emperor’s New Groove- Run for the potion by Musings of an archaeologist

4. THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE – Perfect World (with Reprise) by Arthur Leitgeb

5. Perfect World Karaoke [Without Vocals] by GirGrunny

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movie in four icons.

movie

 

Don’t talk about it.

 

 

 

 

Guess in the comments!


 

 

Took a while for me to figure out how to represent this movie’s unique, layered plot in minimalist images, but once I finally did, I had access to the awesome icons thanks to…

Proletkult Graphik, Emily Iles, Michael Thompson, and Luis Prado from The Noun Project.

Stitching Together a Movie in 4 Icons

When it came time to do my One Story, Four Icons assignment, I’ve realized that I have a bit of an odd taste in movies. I’d much rather see live theatre or go to a concert than watch a film, and the films I do tend to watch tend to be not all that mainstream.

Because of this, and because I was having fun while doing my first one, I decided to give people three films to guess.

To do this assignment, I made a blank canvas in GIMP and imported the four icons I chose from The Noun Project for each movie into the canvas. I scaled some of them up so that they were the right size and added text to the bottom of each before saving them as a gif.

It was my first time using GIMP since I could not get the files to open in Photoshop. I like GIMP but I don’t plan on using it all that much since its font selection process was tricky. I like to be able to see all of my fonts in a list since I have quite a large collection and do not know many by name and GIMP makes you type in your font name.

Leave your guesses in the comments, and I’ll reveal the movie title during my weekly summary

movie1

 

 

 

 

 

movie2

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Peace from the public domain via The Noun Project
  • Farm from the public doman via The Noun project
  • Music designed by Madebyelvis from The Noun Project
  • Marijuana from The Noun Project

movie3

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lulu on the go!

Play by Play was one of the assignments I chose to do this week.  The purpose was to “take any real life video and give us a play by play commentary on what we see!”

Lulu is a bearded dragon and she loves crickets.  She spends most of her time in her cage, but does enjoy the occasional walk under the sunshine.  I actually think that Lulu is a male lizard, but by the time we found out, I had had her for a year, and we didn’t want her getting confused with the sudden name change.

I had a video of my lizard Lulu that I recorded over the summer.  I took her out on a walk, with her leash of course.  I decided to use this video for this assignment because I kinda just wanted to show her off :) .  The video consists of me narrating what she was experiencing at the moment of her walk!  I thought this would be a good assignment to do because it would be so cool if we could actually hear our animals think and know what is going through their head at when their roaming around outside.

I’m not an expert on iMovie, heck I didn’t even know how to do anything so it took me a while to get started.  It took a lot of messing around with it to start being comfortable around it.  Luckily, when I imported the movie onto there I saw that in the middle of my screen there was a microphone and BOOM! a light went off.  My experiences with audacity really came in handy, and I remember that if I wanted to do a voice over I would probably have to lower the volume on the video, or mute it all together.  Luckily  it was fairly easy muting the sound from the video and recording my voice over it.  The wonderful thing about it was that iMovie is that it allows you to play the video at the exact moment you start recording so it really allows you to be precise on the timing.  One thing I couldn’t manage to fix was how slim the video was.  I wish I could have figured out how to make it wider.  I did some intense research and found that the reason it’s like that is because of the way I filmed the video on my iPhone. Regardless of that little mishap, I am pretty content with the overall product.

I hope you enjoyed my video. :)

Worth 2 stars.

Visual Assignment: Supercut It

This was a pretty cool assignment. The objective take a cliche from film and cut multiple clips into a supercut! I had fun with the overuse of rain in films and cut together some of my favorite examples.

“Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure. A supercut is a “fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV. Supercut.org collects every known example of the video remix meme.” For examples and descriptions of supercutsvisit:”-Submitted by: Michael Branson Smith

Skipping a beat

Week six we got introduced to design!  We had to choose different design assignments, and I choose to do Valentine’s Alternative!  This assignment was worth 2 stars, and it was a little bit more complex than I had originally anticipated.  I messed around with Photoshop, which I had never done before so that’s where the challenge came in.  It took me a little bit to figure out what to do, and what each individual tool was for.  I was a little difficult to figure out how to have a background image, and put some more on top as well as figuring out how to crop my heart picture to make it fix!

Slide1

Valentines day is the of love, and I wanted to express that by putting a picture of a heart on my card.  I feel that having a real heart is more meaningful, specially because it went with my quote.  ”You give me premature ventricular contractions” is basically scientific talk for “you make my heart skip a beat.”  When I first heard that quote in a movie called No Strings Attached  I absolutely loved and I was waiting for the perfect opportunity to say it and I guess this is it!