umwfa12s2 – Assignment Bank

Kaylashov Effect

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A 2-star assignment: Create your own Kuleshev effect demonstration by putting together 4 clips a la what AH describes here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNVf1N34-io&feature=youtu.be 4 clips should be: 1) a medium or close-up shot of a person looking at the camera with no or subtle emotion x2 2) object of emotional response 1 (woman and baby in AH clip) 3) object of emotional response 2 (woman in bikini in AH clip)

I don’t know why I wanted to do this assignment in the first place, maybe because of my growing fascination with Alfred Hitchcock? The original Kuleshov effect would be used over and over and over and over and over again. I think that would be a huge challenge and a really neat idea for future videos. Maybe that could be a unique movie about the recycled facial expressions of two characters.

I recorded this video a week ago when my friend was visiting from Wales. She was here for maybe two days before she left to go home-home, and I knew that there would be no re-takes. I should have thought to take multiples just in case, but alas, no multiples. This video was a pretty straightforward jumping point, but maybe I should have worked backwards instead of collecting random videos with my camera and then playing around with the video of my friend – I would have had more options and I maybe could have had a story that made more of an impact.

The story that I settled on was that of increasing ridiculousness. I hoped to use the similar reaction to a similar story prompt. The same reaction is given to the same words and figure but when locations are changed they slightly alter the mood. The lighting is intentionally brighter than the place she is sitting because, “Here I Am,” is a bold statement full of warmth and light. The darkness is kind of more mysterious. The contrast of these locations also set up the irony that maybe the light didn’t need to be found or the words should have been in the darkness instead of fully exhibited in the light.

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Cat? A ds106 Recycled Media Assignment

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Arggh, since my hippie hosted main blog is down for the count tonight, I shall hang my blog post here. In prepping the work for next week’s ds106 section on Remix, I needed/wanted to do one of the assignments we just added- Recycle the Media in which we are charged with making a mashup from the content that students shared a few weeks back- their left over, unused bits of media from previous assignments. We loaded over 150 of these to a site on minus.com to make available for download and mixing up.

So without much more ado, my story about a cat:

This story was driven by the primarily the “flames and woman’s scream sound” which lef me to the grill one, and from there, well. this.

So we have a cat who is missing. Dad just tries to say “it’s ok” (he does not care about the cat). The little kid passes the blame. And now there is meat sizzling on the barbecue (insert wilhlem scream). What about that cat? Where is it?

The media used included:

Fur
Hand
Cat
Innocent Kid
Three empty bowls
Meat on a Grill
Shining GIF (note I had to open this in Quicktime movie player and save it as a .mov to import into iMovie)
Ahhh audio (with Jaws theme music)
Fire with Woman Scream audio
Pouting Girl

I replicated the short “Ahh” sounds 3 times by option click dragging the audio track. I also copied and pasted 3 more times the short Shining Clip. From there it was a matter of overlaying some titles

This was a second edit, I added a bit more because the first one was a tad morbid.

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This Is My Gratitude

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A 2-star assignment: Tell a short story using flashcard and record yourself. It can be something funny, sad, or just even express how your day was.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I wanted to do a short tribute of thankfulness in video form. What better way to tell my story? I do believe that gratitude is the overflow of a joyful heart. I’m a lover of the exchange of words on paper.

This was a semi-easy assignment (thus the two stars) and I wanted it simple because the words were going to be the most important. The video was recorded and uploaded from my phone. The music that is playing is a lyric-less Josh Groban track that I adore. It’s a beautiful and season-appropriate melody. I also thought narration would be inappropriate because the flashcards were going to be used.

There is something nice about a hand-written aspect to a video even if the handwriting is not the prettiest. Handwriting is raw and something that I find is most in line with whatever emotion I am feeling. The papers are also reflective on the way I feel. Granted, these are the papers that I found to be the most handy and available, but color impacts how you perceive things and I wanted these to mirror how I saw the person or what I knew the person’s tastes were. I know that I am spewing a lot of reasons and not much story here, but I think that each person is their own story and between the two of us we create another paragraph together in the book of life.

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Screamy SuperCuts

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Supercuts are a serious of clips which highlight a sertain aspect/clique/theme/line which is overused or just frequently implemented in a piece of media.

For my supercut I chose True Bloods Ginger. For those of you who have never seen True Blood, I watch it because I find it to be funny… though I don’t think it was meant to be that way. A common thing for Ginger to do is scream… at everything… always. I tried to tell a story of the day in the life of Ginger, opening the bar, dealing with guests and the varies vampires she works for.

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Spaceships

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In honor of Firefly’s 10th Anniversary of it’s cancellation I decided to do a tribute assignment to them in the Genre/Song Mash up. in this we were to take clips from varies TV shows/movies that exhibit a similar aspect and set it to a popular song of today.

For Mine I chose Alligator Sky by Owl City and did a science fiction style spaceship motief featuring shots of Serenity, the space ship from Firefly. I thought the song lined up perfectly with the shots, and I tried to capture the emotional bond between Captain Reynolds and Serenity. Clips include many shots from star wars, star trek, Firefly and others. I hope you enjoy your flight, ad remember to be good to your ship.

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Make a Scene from a Horror Movie

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I was not very happy with the end result of this one. The goal was to recreate a scene from a horror film, so I immediately thought of “The Shining” and hereeee’s johnny and all that jazz. Well I had originally intended on having some friends help me with this, so that we could do it with real people, but apparently my friends don’t like me enough and wouldn’t do it. I tried thinking of other ways to do it from me doing all the parts myself (I tried it, it was terrible), to making like a picture slideshow, but I didn’t like how any of them turned out. Luckily I acquired some legos and I figured that they would make a good idea, as kind of puppets I guess you could say. I filmed it probably 20 times because of a combination of me messing it up and my computer not cooperating. I guess it’s kind of clever to not actually use real people, but I still think it would have turned out better had I done that instead. Just to make it clear, the guy with the axe, hacking away at the wall is Jack, and the girl with the knife jumping around for dear life because she is terrified is Wendy.

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Stubborn Prezi User

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A 5-star assignment: You’ll need a camera. And you’ll need another frame. Hold the frame in one hand (don’t let you hand cover the side facing you), and take a picture with it in the center of the image. Then step backwards and take another photo just like it. Repeat until you are tired of making art. Nest the images in Prezi inside the frame of the next picture. Now make a zoom path. Record it with video capture software. Add some video editing (you’ll have to use multiple stacks(only so much zoom in Prezi atm) and splice the ends of them together to make it seem contiguous), and you have a trippy.

I started this assignment a week ago and couldn’t figure out prezi for the life of me. I would spend about an hour on it everyday and I finally got it figured out. You close all your windows and tabs and insert your re-scaled images in (prezi did it for me, but I was also challenging it by uploading about five or so images at once ctrl+click). The rest of it was pretty straightforward.

My spin on this assignment was to have the frame shifting and also for the frame to be blurred by altering my field depth. I was shooting indoors at night so my aperture was at its widest at f/5.6 and sometimes even f/4 and the shutter speed did as it please. My focal length was at 55mm and after a while I didn’t stop to make sure everything I wanted was in focus – I just kept shooting. I wanted my movement to be more than just stepping backward, partially to remove the humans from their sitting/setting and more of a story on the way that my eye moves when I move with it.

So, the content: Shoes. I liked the idea of reverse walking and wanted to stick to that. I guess I’m just so used to walking forward that you don’t think to walk backwards – it’s how Ming Lo moved the mountain! Going off of that (Ming Lo) book that I read as a child I thought also to bubbles and the innocence of bubbles. I also wanted to create a story of perception, like I said earlier, of the way that the eye moves when you move with it. It’s pretty disorienting.

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I Want To Go Into Space

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A 5-star Return to the Silent Era assignment: The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.

One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search

Sourcery
Video
Railroad Scare http://youtu.be/CGivL32FazM
Test Launches http://youtu.be/cP_OM5VVcSo
Homer Proves His Innocence http://youtu.be/udHB3tftPz4
I Want To Go Into Space http://youtu.be/h1F9-NKqDDk
Images
http://www.michaelbransonsmith.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Blank-Title-Card.jpg
http://www.copycatfilms.com/downloads/SilentMovieCard-NTSC-DVwidescreen.png
(I used Paint and TW Cent MT as the italicized font. It seemed appropriate.)
Audio
The Search for Auk13 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyWteUKLIMY&feature=related

This was the most fun I have ever had with creating a video. I don’t think that this is the best video I have created because the title cards seem to pile up in the end [where it's most necessary to propel the story], but it definitely conveys some of the emotions of the story. I love this movie so I chose parts that would evoke that nostalgic feel of watching it for the first time in the sixth grade. This is a story of inspiration. What I wish I included as well would have been watching Sputnik soar in the sky. I couldn’t find anything that seemed appropriate or at the exact angle I wanted it at. This is a story about friendship and drive. I didn’t want rockets and rockets and all the science jargon to have to be part of the title cards, so in this abbreviated movie segment we see them working and learning and investigating.

I dragged all my edited media into VideoPad and strung them together. My biggest blunder is that of having MovieClips.com at the bottom of the screen, especially because they disappear when they title cards come up. I don’t know how to erase them all without having to go in frame by frame. The music was going to be a piano piece like the most silents of that time period, but there’s something magical that happens about a minute in with the score so I preserved the entire audio. I would like to try to mix an audio track for a remixed clip, but I hear that there’s a lot of mixing and mashing going on in the next two weeks so I’ll be a little more patient.

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I’M READY FOR MY CLOSEUP

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BECAUSE I’M ON TIME THIS WEEK! WOOOOOOO YEAH!!

Just replace “Kuzco” with “Haley” and that’s basically how I feel right now. Except, you know, with less throwing old guys out of windows.

Video week was almost as frustrating as it was educational, which means it was REALLY STINKING EDUCATIONAL. I am ready to punch several Microsoft developers in the everything, but that’s beside the point. I got to do a lot of cool stuff this week and improved on not only my video editing capabilities, but my appreciation of films and TV in general.

I took a shot at humor with my own take on a 5-Second Film…

FINALLY got around to creating my very own ds106 assignment:

Revisited a favorite scene from Supernatural as a silent era film:

And babbled about some of my most-loved movie scenes:

Again, I found that good writing and proper time management STILL make the most difference to a project no matter what you’re doing, no matter what kind of medium you’re creating in and no matter how long or short your final product. I also realized that people tend to get lost in video and lose sight of what makes a really good storyreally good,which, again, comes down to good writing and good planning. Because there’s so much going on in a video—sound effects, visuals, music, dialogue—it’s easy to get bogged down in all of that and miss the fact that the basic components of effective storytelling are always the same.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I feel like my blog is getting… kinda boring. In an effort to be explicit about my creative process and clearly detail everything I’m doing to produce my work, my writeups are becoming more and more informative and school-essay-sounding and less about my personal voice. That’s not good, and it’s not what I want for this blog, so in the few weeks we have left I’ll try to strike a better balance between informative and personable when I write.

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“Let your heart kindle my heart”

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Embarrassing confession: I spent a full five minutes crying into my keyboard while attempting to complete the Movie Scenes that Changed Our Lives assignment, all because of ONE CLIP from “A Little Princess.”

Just FYI, if you were not a little girl who grew up in the late 90′s you might not quite get what this movie does to me, but… oh man. Does it ever. In my commentary about the scenes I chose I wanted to let it play out without me babbling over the gorgeous music, so I’ll go into that later. Meanwhile, here’s me rambling about some of my most-loved film and TV moments:

I honestly wish I had more time to spend making this assignment A+ worthy. There’s so much possibility here to really tell a story, to talk about who you are as a person and how your favorite media has shaped your life, the way you think about the world, or even just the other media you see… but it’s Sunday night and it’s late and I’m tired, and frankly I’m pretty happy I found that awesome Sailor Moon clip at all. I must have spent half an hour going through every transformation sequence compilation I could find until I got to the one I wanted to use.

This was by far the easiest assignment from video week. At this point I’m quite familiar with Movie Maker, and can more or less wrestle it into doing what I want. This time around, all I had to do was find three awesome clips that I wanted to talk about (from the Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon and A Little Princess, respectively—though I can’t seem to find the Sailor Moon video I used), convert them, upload them into Movie Maker, slap some titles and then use the Narration tool to add my commentary.

I’m not particularly pleased with the quality of the narration, and I feel like this video is kind of long and rambly and boring overall, but I am pretty darn fond of the way Movie Maker automatically adjusts the sound level of clips if there’s narration going on. I feel like I would have had to wrestle with that for hours if it wasn’t built into the program.

I also wish I’d had a bit more time, or a bit more eloquence, to describe why these scenes are so important to me. It’s difficult to convey how much I lost myself in Middle Earth as a teenager, and how passionately I still love the world Tolkien created. The way Sailor Moon introduced me to a whole genre of storytelling that would bring me some of my best memories, most beloved stories, most exciting conversations and closest friendships. I actually talked about that in an earlier post from Design Week, and with a lot more coherence than I used in my video. Then there’s “A Little Princess.” This isn’t Tumblr, so it’d be out of context for me to mash my face against the keyboard and insert a few gifs to express myself, but I will say this: as a little girl who relied on her imagination to get through some terrible, terrible years in grade school, who spent a couple of years with more fictional friends than real ones, who looks up to her dad as a hero and who will never ever lose her sense of wonder at storytelling, this is probably my all-time favorite film. Not to mention the fact that the movie’s lush visuals and gorgeous cinematography influenced my sense of aesthetics for the rest of my life.

Like I mentioned earlier, I felt like this assignment had a lot of storytelling potential that I wasn’t really tapping into, and I was curious to see if students who’d completed it before me managed to do so. In the original example, Rosanna Marie does a great job of presenting high-quality clips and narration while giving us a great sense of who she is and what matters to her. She could have used more footage from “The Social Network” to make it clear why she loved the movie so much, but other than that I really enjoyed her video.

The second video I watched was from one of my classmates this semester, and the Indie Librarian really delivered with her video! By contextualizing her clips with an excellent writeup and writing her narration beforehand (NOTE TO FREAKIN’ SELF), she was able to tell a wonderful story about how she grew up in a funny, witty manner. That’s what I wish I could have done with my own video, so hats off to her!

Moral of the story: DON’T JUST RAMBLE. Good writing always always ALWAYS pays off.

One of these days that lesson is going to stick.