Just another Manic Monday…

This is video assignment 467, Song Visualization. It is worth 2 stars.

“Pick a song (or a minute from a song) and create a video that displays a picture representing the lyrics. Feel free to make it silly or stick with the theme of the song.”

I chose this assignment because I am always watching music videos like this on YouTube, I thought it would be fun to create my own! I chose to do Manic Monday by The Bangle because I think it is a song everyone relates to. After all, who likes Mondays?

I HATE MONDAYS. I love the feeling of sleeping in over the weekend and relaxing, until Monday comes and it is back to reality. I always feel like the weekend spoils me, hearing Monday’s alarm to wake up comes as a shock to me every week, it never fails.

This song is a story in itself, about a Morning. I think many have had mornings like this (hopefully I am not alone here). I really like songs like this one that contain a story (especially when it is a relate-able one).

This assignment wasn’t to difficult. First I saved all of the photos into a folder,  the photos came from Flickr. I opened up Movie Maker and dragged all of the photos into the program, then I placed them in the correct order.  Once the pictures were in the order that they were going to be used, I dragged the sound file into Movie Maker as well (it has been waiting patiently in my iTunes for years). Next I trimmed about 10 seconds off of the long intro to the song and changed the amount of seconds each picture was displayed so that it would appear at the right moment in the song. (This took quite a while and I think I listened to the song about 50 times). Once the timing was all working, I added a title slide and credits at the end.

Photos Used:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23644442@N04/5331520786/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8782969@N04/2943304181/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blamethemonkey/5412683079/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocell/4201081/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cchu/4440403721/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zuzana_baranova/2919215094/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingman/131284292/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brize/7807214458/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/free-stock/7028523331/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andysarmysellscalgary/5843161854/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12674411@N03/3057895966/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theinspirationfiles/5551263670/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mafeguisao/5238906773/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocking_osborne/5362708753/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/highflyerin/4266079702/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oskari-/4459554158/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fat-feet/5927530668/

Product Review – L’Oreal Voluminous Mascara Review

 

This is my one star product review. Yes, its a make up review. Sorry to bore everyone out of their minds.

Anywho, I used Quicktime to record this because I heard it was better quality and I wanted everyone to see dem lashes when I was done. It didn’t work out well. I thought I was recording in HD, but that was a lie.

I recorded it and edited out the bit of me putting the makeup on with iMovie and added the music to make it less awkward.

I really don’t know what else to type in to make this more descriptive. Its obviously worth only 1 star because its simple.

For those who are curious, this product was seven dolla at my local Target! I meant to say that.

Stars so far: [11/16].

Tutorial for my Mother

My mother still has no clue how to work anything Apple related. I’m not sure why, to me it is very intuitive. None the less, I’ve gotten many a call from her trying to figure out iTunes. Here is my tutorial for her on how to make a “Smart Playlist” within iTunes:

I used Screenr to record the video. It is very simple to use, just watch out for the issue wiht clicking “done” (It will hide in the toolbar area).

I watched two examples to make sure I knew how to explain things. One was a tutorial on how to download Skype. She was very consise in explaining what to do. It was cute on how she said “mom” instead of you. I should have done that, too. Another one was how to Google! I thought this was cute because its true: mothers don’t know how to google anything. Both were very cute and informative on how to explain things to someone who has no clue.

 

I’m not sure what else I need to describe for this assignment!

 

This was worth 5 stars so I now have [10/16] stars.

Framed

Framed two stars

“Take a 2 minute video and go through the frames until you find the one that best represents the overall story of your video.”

I choose to use this trailer for the Pursuit of Happyness:

and I think this frame sums up the trailer and movie in general:

This scene is when Will solves a Rubiks Cube after the man in the car with him tells him he can’t, which is a pretty major theme in the movie. You can do anything you set your mind to and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I made this frame by finding a Pursuit of Happyness trailer on youtube, and taking a screen shot of the frame I wanted.

The Hitch Cut

Do the Hitch Cut 4 stars

“Make two versions of a shortthree-shot video — in each instance maintaining the first and third shots, but changing out the second shot in each. Can you get a completely different result from your viewer? “

This video shows that emotions are can be interpreted in many ways. This first take of this video the guy sees a puppy learning to walk, then he makes an expression looking awed by the cuteness. The next take the guy sees a huge body builder and his same expression looks intimidated and fearful. I don’t think this example is as good as the one in the assignment description, but it works.

To make this video I searched for facial expressions on youtube and found a video of a guy making different faces, uploaded it to iMovie, cut two of the faces into a new project then duplicated them.  Then I found a video of puppies and a video of a body builder and cut clips of those videos into the project. I decided not to have audio in attempts to not sway the mood or tone of the video, letting the viewer impose their own tone.

Return to the Silent Era- 50 First Dates

When I first came across this assignment, Return to the Silent Era, I didn’t want anything to do with it.  It looked really difficult, first choosing the movie, then figuring out how to edit the media so it looks old, and then adding title cards to display what the characters are saying. I passed the assignment and kept looking for another fun looking assignment to do.  While I was looking for another one to complete a thought came to my mind about doing 50 First Dates as the movie and maybe somehow mashing the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love, to create a silent era movie. I went onto youtube and found a trailer for the movie 50 First Dates and downloaded it onto my computer, using PwnYouTube to convert it to HQ MP4.

I then opened the movie clip in iMovie and started to play around with the effects. I first selected the whole clip then clicked on the inspector button where I changed the video setting to antique. I then went to the audio section in the inspector button region and turned the volume all the way down to 0% to eliminate the clip noise. I then watch the video and right clicked on the areas where I wanted to split the clip and then added in a text slide. I added a text slide by clicking on the button with a T on the right hand side of the screen. I added multiple clip slides through out the movie, helping the viewers to understand what was going on. I made sure not to put too many text slides into the movie, because I wanted to viewer to come up with some of their own assumptions when watching it. Once I completed adding the text slides I clicked on the button with the musical note and found the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. I dragged the song behind the video and watched the video to see how well it correlated. It ended up correlating well without me having to edit the music. I then went to the share button at the top and exported it. I pulled up youtube and uploaded it onto you tube with the tags VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376 and ds106.

Most silent movies use music without words, typically an orchestra was present at the showing of the movie and would play music as the movie played.  I thought by using a song with words that it would enhance the meaning of the movie a little more.  The song is about no matter how much you try to ignore someone or push someone away, there will always be someone that loves and cares for you.  The song related to the movie because Lucy, maybe not on purpose, would push Henry away, yet Henry always cared and was in love with her.  I chose this movie to place in an old time era, because the story is about how this guy is fighting for a woman he loves, which i feel is a traditional way of dating. Compared to society now, where I feel there is more promiscuity and it’s rare to find the perfect guy, this movie shows that there are still guys out there that have the old fashioned dating techniques.  WIth the movie portraying old fashion ways of a guy winning a girl over, i thought it would be perfect to put it into an old time era.

Assignment Details:
Return to the Silent Era (5 Stars)
(http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/return-to-the-silent-era/)
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

Do this Assignment

If you complete this assignment, share it! If you are signed up with a blog that feeds the main DS106 site just use the following tags when writing the post on your own blog to have your example added below. (You must use BOTH tags!):VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376

If your blog is not connected to ds106, you can add your example directly.

2 Examples by other people are shown below….

Silent She’s the Man

Return of the (Almost) Silent Mean Girls

Both of these examples that I watched seeemed to fulfill the Silent Era movie requirements. I like the music that was used for the She’s the Man silent era remake, along with the placement of the script both above and below the movie clip. For the Mean Girls silent era remake I liked how the clip was sped up a bit and that the creator went outside the box and had parts where the characters’ were portrayed. I did find it difficult at times to read the script that was being used for the silent era movie, and I feel like the movie could have been a little more black and white in color. Overall though, the creators of both the silent era movie remakes did a good job and it was cool watching what they created.

Supercut- Friends edition

When I saw this assignment, Supercut it, I instantly thought of Friends and Joey’s famous saying “How you doin’.”  I have grown up watching Friends ever sense I was in elementary school. Joey was my favorite guy character because of how personable and funny he was.    It never failed that 1 out of 3 episodes had Joey hitting on someone, it was his characters ‘thing.’  I always thought it was funny to watch his attempts at picking up dates and I thought it would sum up his character rather well.  When joey is saying “Hey how you doin’” he is really hitting on them and in a sense saying that he finds them attractive and would want to get to know them more by inviting them to dinner or hanging out.  When he says his saying, in his mind he is thinking “man this person is good looking, what are my chances with her.”  If a guy were ever to approach me saying “how you doin’” I would most likely die of laughter, just for it making me think of Joey on Friends.

To create this montage, I googled “Joey’s saying ‘How you doin”” and watched a good amount of clips of episodes containing him using his famous phrase.  (My blog Pre Production http://ashstegemiller.com/wordpress/2012/11/04/pre-production/ has in it all the youtube videos I used for the montage.)  Using the various youtube videos downloaded onto my computer, I opened them in MPEG Streamclip and used the I and O key to specify the start and stop positions of each section of the clip I wanted to keep.  I then saved each new trimmed clip and then combined them all together. It was important when selecting all the clips to be put together, if an order was desired, to select the clips in reverse order of how you wanted them played. I made sure each individual clip was in the same size/shape/dimension so they would correlate together, but for some reason some didn’t conform properly, even when I set them up with the same dimensions. I then uploaded the video on to youtube and tagged it with the tags VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments608 and ds106.

 

Assignment Detail:

Supercut It ( 5 Stars)
(http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/supercut-it/)

Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure. For examples and descriptions of supercuts visit:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/supercut

http://supercut.org/

Do this Assignment

If you complete this assignment, share it! If you are signed up with a blog that feeds the main DS106 site just use the following tags when writing the post on your own blog to have your example added below. (You must use BOTH tags!):VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments608

If your blog is not connected to ds106, you can add your example directly.

2 Examples by other students….
Stuff Sheldon says..

Remember ScoobyDoo

I really liked the montages that were created. The Stuff Sheldon says, was really cool and I love watching the big bang theory and I think it portrayed Sheldon’s personality very well! The Remember ScoobyDoo montage was really cool and well put together and reminded me of my child hood watching ScoobyDoo early in the morning on Saturday.

Will Ferrell Supercut

Supercut It five stars

“Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure.”

I decided to “supercut” clips of Will Ferrell being overly dramatic.

For this assignment the first thing I thought of after reading overused themes was Will Ferrell. He is the same character is EVERY movie he’s in! He can be funny but its always the same tactic, being over dramatic in average situations. The montage is just a few scenes of many, I’m sure you can think of others.

To make the montage I searched for clips of Will on youtube, downloaded them via PwnYouTube imported them to iMovie, cut the bits I wanted into a new project and uploaded it to youtube

Clips from: Elf Dogs USA Bad Cop Wooden Gun KStew

Play it back- Candy Edition.

When i first saw this assignment, Play it back jack, I thought it would be cool to microwave a marshmallow, watching it blow up, and then reversing it.  After thinking about it though, there wasn’t much of a story behind blowing up a marshmallow in a microwave.  I ended creating a video of me eating a candy bar and then reversing it.  My main thought when creating this video was regret over eating candy.  Halloween has just passed and I am sure that I am not the only person that regrets eating a bunch of candy.  The thought of reversing the motion so it was as if I never ate the candy seemed perfect.  I chose to not go further back to when the candy was purchased at the store and created in the factory because the candy i used was taken from my sister.  I feel like in most cases when it comes to Halloween candy and myself, either I take it from kids that went trick or treating or I take the left overs from what my sister got.  It might seem wrong to take it, but I am pulling the broke college kid card and take candy from my loved ones.  By taking or i guess what some people would call stealing candy form my loved one, i could have made a video of me sneaking it, but that would leave video evidence of me taking the candy and I would like to plead innocence until they can prove I took the candy, which means no video of me taking the candy!  The only trouble was….making the video reality, so I would be able to eat and enjoy the candy and then just hit a reverse button to make it as if it never happened.  Well sense that is not possible in real life, the magic of video editing makes it possible in a media setting.  To create this video I stole a piece of candy from my sister then made her video tape me opening and eating the candy bar.  I then uploaded the video onto my computer and opened it in iMovie.  There I then selected the clip and pressed the inspector button (to the right of the crop button, in the center of the iMovie screen) which brought up a box with clip, video, and audio selection.  I clicked the clip selection and selected the reverse box.  I then save the movie and exported it onto youtube.

Assignment details:
Play it Backward, Jack! (1 Star)
(http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/play-it-backward-jack/)
Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don’t they? So take a video of something in your life–someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever–and reverse it! Check out an example here: http://youtu.be/sTef_w2ZZhk

Do this Assignment

If you complete this assignment, share it! If you are signed up with a blog that feeds the main DS106 site just use the following tags when writing the post on your own blog to have your example added below. (You must use BOTH tags!): VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments447

If your blog is not connected to ds106, you can add your example directly.

Example!
I went onto the assignment page and tried to look at others example but the pages wouldn’t load, so I am reviewing the main example.

I thought it was cleaver of how he used a thing some people do randomly just to have fun and reverse it. The reversal of him sliding turned out really cool and the person that created this assignment came up with a cleaver assignment.

Funny Guy

One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds 3 Stars

“Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each.”

I choose to use Funny Guys as my archetype:

For this project I choose the archetype funny guys, These 5, Jonah Hill, Steve Carrell, Will Ferrel, Michael Cera and Zach Galifainakis are definitely my favorites. They are a certain type of funny, witty seemingly without having to try. The audio is a clip on Zach laughing in one of my favorite movies, Due Date.

I made the video by googling images of all of the guys, dragging those photos to iMovie, recording the audio from a youtube clip through audacity, adding the audio and wah la!

Sources: Steve Jonah Will Mike Zach