OKayyy, So as you can see my mind was thinking about more then just DS106. With this cold weather I’ve already gotten into the Christmas Spirit. I know we still haven’t had thanksgiving and I usually try to hold out. But, this year I just couldn’t do it! I decided Thanksgiving will be a part of the Christmas celebration this year.
That said, I was listening to Christmas music as I worked on this assignment. So, my list of random words was not all that random.
The next step in this project was to plug in each word to google image. I searched through the pictures and found one I like for each word. The links to the websites where I decided to pull the photos from are linked below.
After downloading these pictures to my iPhoto it was time to get to work on making them into a motion film.
I’ve been tinkering with Imovie a lot these past two weeks. And, I’ve learned ALOT!!! One by one, I dragged the photos to a new project in my iMovie. I actually used a themed project for this film. It created a really unique way of presenting the photos. With a little christmas music the project was golden!
The purpose of the film is to tell a story with the pictures. The assignment gave the option of having sentences to do so, or just allowing the photos to do the talking. I added a title to get folks minds set then allowed the photos to tell the well known story.
This is 5 star, video assignment 608, Supercut It. The instructions were:
“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.”
This assignment caught my eye because I love video montages, and I thought it would be really cool to create one myself. When I read this assignment I immediately knew I wanted to created a funny montage of the strange Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory.” It is one of my favorite shows, I think I like it so much because of the funny things Sheldon says and does. Also, I am kind of socially awkward, not to the extent of Sheldon but I feel like I can kind of relate. This is a show my entire family watches together and loves; we even record the episodes just in case we aren’t around when they come on.
I think that even if you have never seen “The Big Bang Theory,” my video montage will allow you to experience Sheldon’s hilarious and awkward personality! I like to think of this montage as telling the story of Sheldon’s everyday life.
To create this montage, I first found funny Sheldon clips on YouTube. Then I downloaded each one I planned to use. Next I dragged the clips into Movie Maker (I stopped using Streamclip, It started messing up my computer!) and I trimmed the clips down to make the montage more fast-paced. I only kept the segments that were necessary. Once all of the clips were trimmed, I dragged them around until I was satisfied with the order. The most time consuming step was trimming down all of the clips.
Framed is an assignment that involves taking a 2 minute video and and going through the frames until you find one that represents the overall story of the video. I wasn’t exactly sure what this idea meant so I looked at Amelia’s example with the Pursuit of Happyness. She perfectly showed the main theme of the movie.
I chose to do this with The Fox and the Hound. I seem to be going on a Disney kick lately so I decided to keep it up. I really like the theme behind the movie, Friendship. It is about a very unlikely friendship between a hound dog and a fox. In the movie, they are technically supposed to be mortal enemies. However, like in most Disney movies the good overcomes the evil and they are friends for life. It has some sad parts, but I like to ignore those.
I chose the beginning clip where Todd and Copper first meet. It is obviously vital to the whole story. Without this clip, there would be no movie.
The frame I chose within the clip was where Todd and Copper interact for the first time by touching noses. Copper realizes that Todd is what he has been trailing. It is kind of ironic because they both have no idea that they are not meant to be friends.
To get this clip I downloaded it using keepvid. I then converted it to a .wmv file using Real Player. The clip was about 3 minutes long so I cut it down to a little over two minutes. I also thought it was a bit dark so I added an effect that lightened the clip.
This assignment is the SuperCut assignment. Essentialy, the idea was to take an overused dialouge, motif, theme, etc from a movie or TV show and mash them together. I’ve been watching way too much Prettly Little Liars, so that is what I decided to “super cut”. They scream way too much in the episodes. Like, the producers must have a bag of Halls cough drops on them at all times.
One example I watched was the Will Ferell supercut. I thought it was wonderful, really. The ds106er was right – Ferell plays the same character with the same voice and tone over and over again. He must be typecasted for everything now. Anywho, I thought it showed the purpose of the assignment very nicely.
Another one I watched was other exmaple using anime. This got it across extremely well! It was well edited and showed many exmaples of what to look for in anime.
I choose this assignment because I watch this show all the time, plus I’ve read the books. It has an interesting plot line that can be way too dramatic at times. Their screeches shock you, especially Spencer’s because her face always looks terrified. I noticed this before doing the assignment and when I saw this supercut, I thought that it would be perfect with this.
The story behind the whole show is that the girls are getting stalked by some unknown person named “A.” Without ruining it, that’s all I can tell you, but this idea of dramatic screams is in every ABC drama and every thriller movie and every horror movie. This idea stretches way beyond four rich girls getting stalked. I’m not sure when this zoomed in screaming because (I’m going to guess with Alfred Hitchcock) but it works wonders to make people anxious.
To make this, I downloaded the clips (A is reveled, Hanna gets hit by a car, Toby’s secret is reveled, Ian chasing Spencer) using PwnYouTube and plunked them into iMovie. From there I listened for screams for anytime they mummer “ahh help!” Then I selected that selection and moved it to the top of iMovie (I have iMovie ’08, so its still on the top where you “edit”). I didn’t add any transitions so it would be more dramatic. I like the effect of scream after scream.
This week we’re beginning to make movies of our own in attempts to tell stories in that way. The task was to complete at least 16 stars worth of Video Assignments.
The first assignment that I decided to take a swing at was creating a movie trailer from the “Silent Era“. The goal of this assignment was to focus on the music and cue cards to make the movie trailer as interesting as possible. The movie assignment showed an example of the Star Wars movie trailer displayed silently with only words and music to draw you in. I think the example assignment did a good job of setting up how the movie should look and how it actually seems like a movie trailer from the “Silent Era’. I also watched another video from a student that decided to do the movie “Finding Nemo” and use different captions and a really good song to express the trailer for that fun loving kid movie that everyone would enjoy. I chose this assignment because I’ve never really been a fan of silent movies or movies from the old days, but I’ve always been one to support people having their own interpretations. I thought that it would be cool to make a modern movie silent and see the difference in it’s meaning when the actual words from the movie weren’t involved. “The Dark Knight” is actually one of my favorite movies and I just love all the intensity it has along with it’s actual story.
Through my Silent Era assignment I attempted to tell a story of the movie “The Dark Knight” and it’s major events by showing the trailer and providing captions that allowed someone to understand it. The actual trailer to the movie has words and dialogue that give you a glimpse of the movie … I attempted to do the same thing with my captions and music, but instead I summed up the key parts that I took out of the movie when I watched it initially. I started my clip off by saying where it took place and what the main purpose was… I made sure to include the lead actors in the movie as well. I then added another interesting point about the movie and then continued to have various captions of traits and actions that are found in the movie. I let the trailer do a lot of the talking, but I made sure to sum up the points I thought would be important for someone who hadn’t seen the movie to see.
In creating this trailer… I simply used www.keepvid.com to download the actual youtube movie trailer of “The Dark Knight” onto my computer. After doing so … I simply imported it into my iMovie and created a new project. I then adventured around with different features and figured out how to mute the sound and change the color into black and white. Then I adventured around with a song that I might want to play and figured that the “Halloween” theme song fit the action in the movie the best. I then downloaded the song as an mp3 file and placed it into my iMovie project. After watching the originally trailer multiple times and recalling the events I took from the movie myself … I decided I’d think of ways that I could display the story using the trailer. After I decided what I wanted to display in the movie … I added captions and found different places to put the font in order to use each scene as best I could. After all of this I did a lot of reviewing and editing to make it turn out as perfect as I could. Thankfully…. I have a few friends that are interested in the work that I do for this class and were willing to pitch in some ideas as well as watch my final piece. They each gave me different feedback and suggestions that I either chose to ignore or went back and edited. One of the suggestions that I received was to slow down some of scenes so that the captions I could posted could be read easily. A lot of my friends enjoyed my clip and said that it looked like it was hard or took a lot of time. I plan on posting it on my twitter as soon as I’m done with this post… maybe I’ll get a few comments & more feedback from there as well.
The assignment Watching Movies with the Stereo on seemed pretty basic. It involves to take a clip of a movie and add audio that somehow fits with the clip. When I looked at it I wasn’t aware of how cutting the movie and the music to fit together is key! I tried looking at some examples but found that most of the websites didn’t work (a problem I seem to be running into a lot). However, the two examples that were on the assignment gave me an idea. The music really fit with the beat of the clips. My personal favorite was the Circle of Life/Frankstein combinations. The play on the clip of making Frankstein is a bit comical with the meaning of the Circle of Life song.
I’m not sure why I chose this assignment. I think it was mainly because it seemed simple to me. And I really liked the examples that were with it. When I decided to do this assignment my mind blanked on a song and movie that would go together. So, like I always do, I asked my roommate. We sat there and contemplated movies (She’s the Man and UP). I decided I definitely wanted to do an animated movie. As we were discussing I also decided that a play on words would work for this assignment. We finally came up with the song Howling for you by the Black Keys. We figured a dog movie would go perfect with this song. The next step was coming up with a movie with dogs (All dogs go to Heaven, Oliver and Company, and Homeward Bound all came to mind). We decided the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene would go great. I realized this was a slower clip and I assumed I was going to have to speed it up a bit to go along with the upbeat of the song. However, when I played them separately together there was a part in the clip that would fit perfectly with the song. I converted the movie clip using Real Player and uploaded it to Windows Movie Maker. The song and the clip went perfectly together! I was absolutely thrilled! I didn’t have to cut the song or anything! As I watched how they went together, I decided that the older washed out colors didn’t fit with the song. I wanted something a bit more modern. The first effect I tried was threshold, but it made some parts really bright with blues and reds, then the rest of the scene was black. It was cool, but too harsh. The next one I tried was Edge Detection. I thought it looked really cool! It was all white with a slight hint of color in the lines and outlined the main parts of the scene. It gave an extra touch to the clip.
I showed this video to my other roommate and she thought the play on words was hilarious. She also suggested that I add title credits to the end just to say the name of the song and the movie the clip was from. I agreed.
I really like how the clip and song coordinate together. The story of the clip is of two dogs who are in love and Tramp (the boy dog) is trying to impress Lady (the girl dog) by presenting her a fancy meal even though he is a dog with no home and just roams the street. The story of the song really plays into this. It’s about how the singer really wants the girl.
This assignment seems like it would be fun; I think announcing a pro sport like soccer would be an incredible job to have, both because you would be interacting and engaging your knowledge around some of the best players in the world, and also because you have that power to influence and connect to people through what you say on the air, and how well you get the message across. I started out by looking at a some examples that would actually bring me to a completed assignment. Many of the links found through the Play-by-Play assignment page were no longer working, so I just got an idea of what some people did through the ones that did work!
The first example I viewed was done by a guy named Andrew Johnson; he used an NFL touchdown pass play as his video for which he would do commentary. He did a decent job on it, but his commentary was a bit off at one point and this took away from the quality of his assignment, but an overall good effort. I realize that video editing can be tough, along with getting the audio to match up well. One downside here was that he did not underline his process at all, so I couldn’t really gain any new knowledge concerning what he did or what his inspirations were really.
The second example I viewed was done by a former DS106 student James Cruz. His assignment used a Halo clip from a professional gaming circuit, which I thought was really cool. He provided a bunch of off-the-cuff commentary, and sort of used past experiences to augment his explanations and inspirations for interacting with video games. He provided some input to his inspiration to do this assignment and the process that he used to create it. It was an overall helpful source to look at, and I enjoyed watching it!
I started searching on YouTube while thinking about what I wanted to give a blow by blow analysis on. Here is what I came up with… CUTE PENGUINS!! Check it out!
I am probably going to chop this video up a little bit using MPEG Streamclip first off, and then strip it of the background audio. I will probably add a base layer of some type of audio which will work well to complement the scene and my commentary, so it’s not completely boring and solely my voice, so I think that doing this will make it more enjoyable to listen to. I haven’t decided whether I want to use iMovie or Audacity to record my audio. Right now I am thinking Audacity because it is built for doing that, but I will do some research and see what other people have done! Anyways, this is about it for my pre-work for this assignment, and I hope you all watch it when I am finished!
One of the Video Assignments that I would love to try my hand at is the Return to the Silent Era assignment. My plan for this is to take the Ultimate Trilogy trailer for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises and turn it Silent style. I think this will be absolutely so cool!
I found an awesome Silent Film Score named Villainous Treachery from Royalty Free Music that I want to use and think would go great as the music for this clip. It is Dark, Intense, everything that fits with the Dark Knight Rises, so it should work out well.
For the Text Cards I am using this layout, and will probably try to find a way to put it into iMovie as the theme, and enter text that way, or use GIMP to do it.
I looked at a few examples of this assignment and definitely liked what I saw. The first one was done by Brittany Parsons, and here is her Finding Neemo in Silence project , which is really awesome. She actually sped up the trailer and the music really reflected this fast motion. It worked really well for the project; another interesting thing that she did was overlay the text onto the trailer, which is something I wouldn’t have thought of doing, but I certainly like the idea.
The next example I checked out was Ben Rimes’s fantastic transformation of the train chase scene at the end of Back to the Future 3 which can be found here . Ben used many of the effects that I would strive to use to make my movie really aesthetically antiquated and believable. I really have to give it to him though, even though he calls his efforts “sophomoric“, I thoroughly enjoyed his Return to the Silent Era assignment. He illustrated his techniques in a tutorial that is incredibly detailed, and I will thank him very much for it. He also really talked about a past experience in a 5th grade class that I found humorous and which was easy to connect with. So I encourage everyone to go check his example out!
I consulted this man’s helpful tutorial on how to convert a video to Black and White in iMovie, which seems to be pretty simple…
Overall, I think that this will be a fun assignment to do, and I hope to Wow you all and add in elements that you did not see coming! You will see more soon, I promise!!
5 Second Films is one of my favorite websites ever. I discovered their work earlier this semester and thought their style of storytelling was perfect for ds106—I was actually considering creating an assignment based on their films before I realized someone else had already beaten me to it! Though I’d give the 5 Second Film assignment four stars instead of three, I was still delighted at the chance to give it my own spin.
My favorite 5 Second Film, by far and away, has to be “The Sanctity of Marriage.”
Though my video isn’t remotely as amusing, I gave it my best shot:
My inspiration for this assignment was pretty simple: I got to talking about it with my little brother, and we started hashing out ideas for what I could make a 5 second film about. Somewhere in the conversation this script happened, almost exactly as it appears in the film (initially we’d chosen a dresser as the not-mom, but a fridge just seemed funnier). For anybody who’s wondering, I did do my research on this one: schizophrenia can cause hallucinations and make it difficult to distinguish reality from delusions. This might be taking it a bit far, but let’s call it artistic license, shall we?
Filming was a bit of a challenge as I was alone in my apartment at the time. I started filming in my room, putting the camera on my desk to film my parts and on the window to capture the dresser, but then chose to re-film everything with a fridge instead. I placed my camera on the counter in the kitchen to film me and the refrigerator, but filming myself on the floor was a bit tricky. I ended up balancing the camera on the door of our half-open dishwasher to get that shot, and the angled turned out perfect.
To get the audio of the fridge talking, I recorded myself speaking in my bathroom to get a decent echo effect (Audacity’s is pretty terrible), then uploaded the file and converted it using Online-Convert.com (if that website didn’t exist half my assignments wouldn’t get done!), and after that it was just a matter of speeding up the audio a little to fit the time frame. I hadn’t anticipated the change it pitch that would result from speeding up the audio, but the ridiculousness of it ended up fitting perfectly with the humorous tone I wanted to convey. I tried to find some sad piano music to enhance the scene, but I couldn’t find anything simple enough to not distract from the dialogue. In the end I decided to do without this time around.
After I had everything converted and ready to go, I dumped all of my clips into Windows Movie Maker and got to editing. I’d actually recorded a bunch of takes (especially of the last scene with me in the fridge), so I had to choose which one I liked best, then shave each clip down to just a few seconds. I had a friend with me for the final stages of editing, and she helped me settle on the best “I just want you to love me!” take, assuring me the one I chose was the funniest. In the end the film itself ended up going a few milliseconds too long (and my titles are a few seconds more than 5SF’s 8-seconds-per-video-counting-titles-rule), but I figure I can get away with that, being an amateur and all.
Once I’d put the final touches on my video and uploaded it to YouTube, I went back to the ds106 Assignment Page to check out a few other student’s attempts at this project. I was disappointed to find that many of the links to student blogs were broken, but eventually hit on Alasia Laureano’s 5 Second Stop-Smoking PSA and Andrew Johnson’s 5 second screamer vid. I don’t think either of them really took the spirit of the assignment into account when creating their videos, and instead of telling a story opted to simply “create a 5 second film of anything,” as Alasia put it. One of the reasons I love the stuff produced by the 5SF crew is that it’s all so meticulously planned—they use environment, props, animation and special effects, camera cuts and the script itself to tell a story in just 5 seconds. While some of their stories are more successful than others, the best ones (like “Sanctity of Marriage,” above) do a great deal of work in an extremely condensed time frame. I don’t believe either of the student examples I saw really achieved that. Perhaps to change this in future, the assignment description could be updated to emphasize that props, scripting, and environment should all be used carefully to tell a complete story in 5 seconds.
Overall, I’m happy with the way this film turned out. I may have made a complete fool of myself, but I guess all that counts is whether or not you made somebody laugh.
This assignment took forever! The second video assignment I decided to do was Return to the Silent Era. This seemed like a really cool assignment because you had to take a trailer from a modern movie and make it antiquated and make it silent era-y.
So at first I wasn’t sure what movie exactly I wanted to do, but I know I wanted to do a movie that I knew pretty well and could work easily with to summarize the movie in the trailer. I watched a couple of the examples that had been done recently by students and really liked my friend Brittany’s silent trailer version of Finding Nemo. I really liked how she had the captions over the scenes of the trailer. I also saw examples that had separated the video clip with a slide with text. I liked putting words onto the actual video so I decided to go with that style for my assignment.
I decided on using a trailer for She’s the Man, with Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. So to start, I went to YouTube, found the trailer I wanted to use, and used Pwn YouTube to download it as a .mp4 file. Next, I uploaded this file onto Windows Movie Maker. I played around with the Visual Effects to see which effect I liked that portrayed a silent era style. I tried Black and White and also Sepia and went with Sepia just because the darks weren’t as dark and bleak and you could see more things clearly with Sepia.
Next was the most tedious part and took the most amount of time. I went through the whole two minutes of the video adding text to most of the video. When I had the part of the video where I wanted the text to go, I clicked Pause, and typed the text I wanted for that. I chose the Bella Donna font because I liked the old classic movie feel that it had to it. I adjusted the amount of time I wanted that particular text to remain on the video slide by changing the time. Different words I wanted to last longer and to be throughout several seconds so I kept those on the video longer. However, other words I didn’t want to last as long as I simpled chose to have it be for one or two seconds, and this also worked if I wanted to make the words come on and off the screen quickly so the viewer could process it like a spoken sentence.
That’s what took me most of the time. Next, I wanted to have a ragtime-y piano sound effect for the music used for my silent movie trailer. So I simply went to YouTube and searched “ragtime piano medley” and listened to a couple videos before deciding on this one. I liked how it was long enough to cover my two minute video and also I really liked the tempo, very upbeat and catchy. To convert it to mp3, I once again used the Video2mp3 website to convert the video to mp3. Next, I uploaded this file onto Audacity because there were parts in the beginning and end that I wanted to cut because it was the person sestting up on their piano and was unnecessary to include in my video. Once I trimmed these parts off, I saved it as a file, exported it, and then uploaded it to WMM. I made sure that it covered my video from beginning to end. Once it was added, I watched the whole thing through to make sure everything worked together and it did! So here is the final piece:
