For this assignment, I chose to do the silent movie.

First, I had to choose a movie. I chose the trailer of Elf because I start watching Christmas movies right after Halloween (or during…). I picked the trailer because it gave such a good overview.  I downloaded it from youtube using iLivid, you just paste the URL in there and it will automatically download the video for you. Once the video was downloaded, I put it into Adobe Premiere. Here’s where it began to take about 6 hours to finish.

I had never really worked with Premiere and there is a HUGE learning curve. Finding out how to mute the track volume was not difficult at all, mainly because when you look to the bottom right of the program, it lists Video 1 and Audio 1. I simply muted the audio. The big problem came with those dang cue cards. I used ones that nearly everyone else I looked at had used. The hard part was figuring out what text to put on them. Once I decided, I tried to import them into Premiere. BIG TROUBLE! I could not for the life of me get these puppies to work right.

I took a deep breath and finally got them spliced in where I needed them, although it chopped up the video and at one point I had two of the same exact thing playing…anyway! (Also, please excuse the third one because it lasts wayyyyy too long but I did not know how to cut it down without messing up the entire video. I tried using the razor tool but it wouldn’t let me slide the rest of the video down to fill in the gaps…so it just leaves more time for the audience to read.) I went to the dropdown menu of video effects and added black adn white and noise by simply pulling those options directly on to the timeline thing of the video and audio. Once I got that mess straightened out, I pulled in the music from the soundtrack. I chose the nutcracker suite because it’s instrumental and it actually ended up going really well with the clip I selected (plus, it came from the soundtrack.)

After what felt like an eternity razoring the video and trying to get everything perfect, I decided to export the media as an mp4. I chose maximum render quality and it exported within a few minutes to my desktop. From there, I put it on youtube and then blogged about it here. Hooray!

I recorded this five second video in order to convey my Saturday morning yesterday. I woke up, and immediately realized I have gotten yet another cold this semester–I’ve determined that college is a petri dish for sickness. Anyways, my immediate reaction to my cold was this. I recorded it, uploaded it, and edited it–just basic trimming. This was the result. Comments and criticism is welcome.

Title: Movie Scenes That Changed Our Lives

Description: For this assignment I was asked to select scenes from 3-5 movies. These scenes were supposed to represent scenes that changed mu life or made some sort of dramatic, traumatic, lasting, or emotional impact on me. After selecting the scenes, I was asked to create a video that shows the scenes and includes audio/video of me describing what it is about the scene that made a significant impact on me.

Inspiration: When I first read the description of this assignment I was immediately drawn to it. I felt that it would not only be interesting to do, but that it would remind me of those critical times in my life where a movie has really impacted me in a way that I never expected it to. The top five movies that I picked where A Time to Kill, The Pursuit of Happiness, and The Help. The Pursuit of Happiness made me think of my mom and how much she has sacrificed for me. It also inspires me to go out there and achieve my goals and dreams. A Time to Kill and The Help are constant reminder to me of how my ancestors have been treated in America. They also remind me everyday to push myself because I am part of a generation that has a choice now.

Process: First, I went on Youtube and a scene from each movie that captured the emotions that I wanted to convey in my video project. I then downloaded the videos to my computer using a program that I downloaded offline. Here is a link to the program:

YoutubeDownloader

I then put the videos into Windows Movie Maker. I added a title scene, a caption scene before each movie clip, and then a credit block at the end. For each movie scene I added the page curl animation to introduce the movie scene.

Previous Example: Here are the links of two previous examples of this assignment. Out of the two examples I felt that the first one definitely got the message of this assignment across more. The second assignment, even though it told a story about that person’s childhood, did not come across as something that was life changing. It was more about the reminiscing on movies that they watched during their childhood. The first example, not only involves more emotions, but I was able to relate to it way more than the second one.

Example 1

Example 2

My Video:

Last Christmas, we gave my grandmother a laptop as a present and she is always requiring help to use it. She enjoys learning how to do something so she can do it the next time. So I made this tutorial for her using ScreenR to capture the action and record my commentary. It encompasses how to uninstall programs from a windows PC. This is a five star assignment.