“Pick a song (or a minute from a song) and create a video that displays a picture representing the lyrics”
I choose to visualize the song Red by Taylor Swift:
This song was pretty easy to visualize, the analogies in the lyrics are pretty straight forward in describing the intended visuals. I went with a pretty literal theme.
To make the video I google searched for the pictures I wanted(links below), saved them to my desktop, dragged them into a new project in iMovie. Then I uploaded the song from iTunes and had to adjust the length of time the pictures were on the screen by right clicking the photos and going to “Clip adjustments” so that the pictures would line up with the lyrics.
I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era assignment. This is worth five stars. The gist of the assignment is to turn a movie trailer (I did the Mean Girls trailer) into a silent movie. For instance, you take the sound away, make it look dated and add “cue cards.” I looked at one about Nemo that was done extremely well as a “background” on what mine should look like. The color of this one was very well done, as is the telling of the plot. However, the best one I saw was Martha’s on Young Teen Wolf. Amazing! The idea for a real cue card is fantastic. The music sounds realistic.
I choose this assingmnet honestly because I already did the “pre-production” for it. I had a picture of what I wanted to happen before I did it and I wanted to make sure my video making went somewhat smoothly. The inspriation was a picture of what Victorian/roaring 20s Mean Girls looked like. Did they “know the rules of feminism”? Did they were pink dresses on Wednesdays and flapper dresses only once a week?
This is part of a story because of what Mean Girls is. Tina Fey, one of the writers, meant it to be a sarcastic joke on how young women act and how they act towards each other. She meant it as a “ha I know this is funny, but it needs to change in our society” (Fey is a big feminist). I feel just thinking about the history of how women have always been vindictive toward each other and how it hasn’t really changed. How would those roaring 20s Mean Girls compare to the ones we have today?
Also, this is just a really good movie.
The process was to use PwnYouTube to snag the Mean Girl trailer off of Youtube. After that took forever to download, I threw that down into iMovie. Just to be clear, this is my first time using iMovie seriously. Then I took it in sections and made it “aged” by using iMovie’s pre-set template. Then I added “cue cards”/text over top of it. This was the hardest part. I couldn’t get it to just be for a few seconds. I played with it and realized the “duration” was for the “cue card” not the clip. After I did that for the rest of the clips, I added in transitions between the clips (Note: it is extremely hard to include all the plot, so to someone who has never seen Mean Girls, this is not what it is about exactly…). Then I went and speed them up by 150%. I left the muting part to last.
This was a mistake.
There are bits and pieces for some reason that just didn’t mute. They were mute in iMovie, I promise. When I played it there, it was actually silent. Then I uploaded it to Youtube and there were little chipmunk voices on some parts!
I don’t get it. So then I went back and tried to find the silly bits that weren’t muted… And they all were. I have no clue. Plus, it was already uploaded and my computer was sounding like a race car, which is a terrible noise to hear from a relatively new Macbook (p.s. does any one have a solution for this? I only had Safari and iMovie open!).
Then I went and downloaded this lovely piano music. The original was way to slow so I popped that bad boy into Audacity and speed it up by like 33% and changed the pitch to like C#. I can’t tell if it sounds good/realistic or like an organ is dying.
Anywho, besides that whole muting snafu, which kind of defeats the purpose of “silent” movie, I learned a lot from this. I had no clue iMovie had all of those presets before, nor did I know it was so “powerful.” It was a really good experience!
Also, the font is tiny. Forgive me, many first time mistakes.
We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January.
The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013).
But it’s nothing like that first year and many of the people who were most active are doing other things.
Now if regular CogDogBlog barking snarling fashion, I might be calling out people, asking “what is #4life”?. Shaming. But that is in no way my intent. And if anyone apologizes I might come over to your house and chew up your shoes or lift my leg on your couch.
If I were not teaching ds106, I would guess my amount of ds106 activity would be low. Once you have gone through the intoxicating round, its naturally to move on, to return on occasion. Like that weird uncle. Maybe not.
But we’ve not seen too many people new join in. And I could guess from here til Tuesday:
People are participating in peripheral ways, like doing Daily Creates or ds106 radio. This is good, Unlike any other MOOC, c or x, in ds106, you do not “fall behind” if you miss a few elluminated lectures or don;t do the weekly homework. The door to entry/exit is completely in your hands, and coming and going happens without penalty.
Maybe its the lack of Jim Groom who is onto amazing work with his hard boiled class. Jim would be the last to claim his presence makes ds106, but he is a draw. Heck its why I came to it.
It’s messy. If you have heard of ds1206, when you get to the site, it’s not even clear how or what to do. You are hit with a firehose. I’ve tried to organize an intro for open participants but I bet its not clear what to do. I have plans to work on this. More than that, after all the teaching that has been done, we have a rather extensive set of resources, recorded videos, various approaches to the assignments. My goal is organize them into a buffet type syllabus so that an open participant could pick and choose a path through the ds106 content.
I may have to repeat myself, this is no slap against all the people who freely played, shared, contributed in ds106 before. With the intensity of the load of following and mentoring 25 students, each blogging several times a week, it gets tobe a challenge to give attention to other work in the community. And while the class will go on regardless, ds106 is better for having the larger cloud of activity, so I am invested in finding ways to make it easier for people to craft their own ds106 experience, and get hooked on the kool-aid.
Take a classic movie (or heck any movie you like), and rescript the audio of a key scene. You will want to re-write the lines to change the meaning or intent of the scene, delete the original audio, and record your own (this can be done many ways, voiceover in iMovie, recording the audio and editing the track in any other movie editor).
I already had this clip, so I imported it into iMovie, and muted the original audio. To get my own dub, I played the video on low volume (so I could try and track the rhythm) and recorded my own voice over in Audacity, reading the content of the ds106 Open Participant web page.
And woah, I totally forgot, when editing an audio track in iMovie, you have some effects available, so for the main track, I dropped mine a pitch
and for the closing credits, I took the “Anyone Anyone” audio (detached the sound from the video of the original), and used the echo audio effect.
I like that, I go on a ramble about ds106 and I end up doing an assignment.
To me, Return to the Silent Era seemed like such a unique project. It involves taking a modern movie and transforming it into a time piece. To give it an old timey feel, it was suggested to change it to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, take away the sound, add music, and maybe some title cards too. I got some really good ideas from examples. However, most were done with iMovie and it took me some time to figure out how to do it with Windows Movie Maker. My favorite example was one done with Mean Girls. It is actually one of my friend’s projects. She did a really good job in speeding up the movie. It was the first example I looked at so I got a feel for the “antiquity” part of the assignment. I also think the movie was a really good choice because the idea of it is very far from the older Silent Movies. The next example I looked at was Martha’s on Teen Wolf. I loved how she changed the wording to words they might have used in older times. It gave a really unique feel to the video. She also used unique cue cards. Using these two examples I put my own twist on Finding Neemo.
I chose this assignment because it is extremely unique. Silent Movies are rarely seen anymore. In fact, more effects are being added to a movie every day. I believe that silent movies really capture the actual story without extra things being added. Don’t get me wrong, special effects can add so much to a movie but I think occasionally it’s nice to just watch a good story. So the real reason I chose Finding Neemo is because it truly is my favorite movie. I think the animation in it is awesome. It’s very realistic to actual fish movement (having taking Bio of Fish and spent a summer working in an aquarium I would know). The story is also very inspiring. It’s about a fish who comes out of his shell to save his son and the adventure of a son getting into a bit of trouble. In the end, everything is happy. The two are reunited and life is wonderful. So of course, this was the story I was going to put the characters in silence. I really want the story to stand out and taking away vocals really makes that happen.
I started with Pre-Production first. I got all of my materials together including: Finding Neemo Trailer, tools I needed to use, an idea of what effects to use, and a sample of my music. I have never really used Windows Movie Maker before so it was a bit of an on-going tough process. I first had problems uploading my video to it. Apparently WMM doesn’t work well with mp4. So I downloaded real player to convert it to a .wmv file. It worked like a charm. I then uploaded my video to WMM and sat and stared for about 15 minutes. I had no idea what to do. So, I went for the basics. I found the effects bar and dragged the “black and white” effects to my movie. I didn’t like it, so I deleted that effects. I then added the sepia effects and that was better. The black and white was too harsh for me. It was then I found the “film age, old” effects. And it was perfect. Slowly this film was starting to look like a silent movie. But, there was one problem: the sounds. I had no idea how to delete the vocals on the movie. I started playing around with volume and random buttons. I finally googled it and found a simple explanation: Clip tab, audio, mute. So simple! It still wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to add in some sort of titles. I didn’t like the look of adding the titles and separating the clip. With WMM you could only change the back ground color (Martha’s were much cooler) so I added the titles on the clip. I actually really liked how the captions turned out. I played around with the font until I came across one that had a “flow” to it. I first had them in black, but they didn’t stand out enough. And since it was supposed to be colorless I changed it to white and it turned out perfectly! I thought everything was too slow so I then sped up the movie. There were already a few frantic clips so I didn’t speed it up too much (FYI a hint, speed up the movie before adding in clips). The next step was the music. I searched youtube for a ragtime piano music. I looked through a lot of them and didn’t like them. Some had vocals, some were too slow, some just didn’t sound right. The music I chose was actually on the first page I had just skipped over it because it was too slow. I decided to play with it. I loaded it into audacity and sped it up a bit. I also changed the tempo some too. I thought it sounded OK, so I added it to the film. The music is actually my favorite part! I think it goes along perfectly with the beat of the characters in the movie!
The credits were the last piece. I wanted to give credit where credit was due (mainly me, but added in Disney and Pixar too). I also felt since it was originally a trailer it left the audience hanging. That wasn’t the silent movie way so I added in what happens in the end on the credits too. There are many things I could have added (old fashion words, cool title slides) but I felt the way I put everything together had the effect I was shooting for. I didn’t want to change the story around, just make it old fashioned. I really like how the whole thing came together in the end.
I tried to get some feedback on this project, but was wildly unsuccessful. I showed my mom when I went home to vote and she said it was “cute” and “good work”. Not much enthusiasm there… And then there was my roommate who really liked it but laughed at the amount of time and how frustrated I got with it. She sort of went through the process with me and had to listen to the tangents I went on about how WMM wouldn’t work. However, the best feedback is how proud I am of the video (I know, cheesy right?)
So I think the overall story is how I worked through my problems and created this piece. It was my first time working with WMM and other tools and had to figure out a few quirks to get going. This is just a start of my video work and there is more to come. I’m sure I will have more difficulties and frustrations to come with those projects however, now I have an idea of how to work through them (mainly Google).
This is video assignment 448! It is worth three stars and the assignment description was:
“Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies.”
Before beginning this assignment I watched a few examples, my favorite was Minions with an F in Evil because I thought it was a very unique archetype and it made me laugh! I also liked the Librarian example because it too was funny and unique in my opinion (just A LOT longer than 5 seconds).
After watching a few examples, I decided to create a video about princesses! Disney princesses basically consumed mine and my sister’s childhood. We still have so many VHS tapes and probably 95% of them are old Disney movies. This project definitely allowed me to reminisce, life was so much easier when all we had to worry about was the princess finding her prince. I think most people know the basic story line of many Disney princesses. I think this will be a video that others can relate to.
The first step in making this video was figuring which video clips to use! I searched YouTube for Disney princess clips and chose 5 that I thought would be good for the video (one from The Princess Diaries, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Snow White). After all 5 clips were downloaded, I had to cut them down to 1 second each (this was HARD). I tried to let the 1 second clips each demonstrate something new to each new Princess. (The amazing new room, the fancy under wear, legs, magical ball gown, and a life saving kiss) Once I had each clip trimmed down, I loaded each clip into Movie Maker and dragged them in to the order I wanted and then I added a text box on each clip (for those who can’t tell what is occurring with just one second of viewing time). I originally trimmed the clips in MPEG streamclip and then trimmed them a little bit more in movie maker, but I preferred Movie Maker’s trimming feature. It was a little less permanent (which is nice because I kept changing my mind). I didn’t add any opening title or ending credits because I really wanted this video to be exactly 5 seconds! And believe me that was quite a challenge!
I guess this is kind of its own, condensed princess story. If it had a narrator…
“Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a new princess, crowned just yesterday. This princess was in awe over her new fancy room and huge new bed, and even her underwear were fit for a princess or so she said. This princess transformed and became as beautiful and graceful as a dove, until she died and could only be saved by her a kiss from her one true love.”
I know its a bit cheesy, but I put in extra effort to make it rhyme, all good fairy-tales rhyme.
Many times the viewers of the movie don’t know or understand the details that go into making a movie. However, you can easily find these interesting facts through wikipedia or imdb. While I was further researching the movie I cam across many details about the making of this movie. It is actually a biography based on the life of Chris Gardner and his struggle through being homeless. In the movie title, happyness is actually purposely spelled wrong due to a sign that Chris Gardner saw when he was homeless outside of a daycare center his son attends. Many of the details of Gardner’s life that took place in the movie over a span of years were compressed down to fit into the 117 minutes allowed. Gardner also thought that Will Smith was mis-cast to play him, but fortunately was set straight by his daughter. Gardner also makes a cameo appearance in the film and is acknowledged by Will Smith who plays him.
Since this film is about someone’s personal life I was categorize this film to be a biography. According the the film’s imdb site the genre is a Biography or Drama.
I took two other scenes from the movie that had details that I described in my review of movie details. In the first scene I found that the character that has the most power was always on the right side. I found this to be true in several other clips that I watched from the movie, however this one was most prominent. The second scene was one where I described a camera technique that sort of went back and forth through conversation.
To create this montage of the two scenes, I downloaded the videos using keepvid. It was very simple and this tutorial explains how to do it but does require Java. I then used MPEG streamclip to cut and combine the videos.
The opening credits give the first impression of what is to come. For the opening credits redux, I have a chance to recreate this in my own way. The most difficult part of the Pre-productions for this assignment was coming up with a good show/movie. I thought about 101 Dalmations, Cinderella (I like Disney classics), or even a James Bond. But I didn’t think I could get a good outcome. I finally decided on my all time favorite show Planet Earth. This show is so awe-inspiring and shows how unique nature really is. I am a nerd and have every episode made along with Disney Earth, Oceans, and Frozen Planet. It’s safe to say I may be a bit obsessed.
I first googled the original opening credits (even though I know it by heart) and bookmarked it for later reference. I then thought about what I wanted to do. The original idea is a compilation of the intense parts of the show with dramatic music in the background. I want to do the opposite. I love this show, even though it does show some of the darkest parts of nature, it still has happy moments. I want to create it more of an up-beat happy-go-lucky type of opening credits. I found a few compilations of scenes off youtube and plan to cut these down and put them together. I’m not sure of the music but have been pondering “Waiting on the World to Change” by John Mayer. I think it would be a good fit, I just want to see if the scenes will fit.
There were no tutorials on how to do this assignment, but it should be simple with a few cuts here and some rearranging and adding some music! Of course, I’m sure it sounds a lot simpler than it is!
For next week’s assignments I decided to do Return to the Silent Era. I have always thought silent movies were really cool and thought it would be really cool to turn a modern day movie into one. I started trying to think of movies that would work really well with this idea. I came up with Finding Neemo. I’m actually not sure how this film is going to convert into a Silent film, but I am willing to try it out.
To prepare for this assignment, I have downloaded a trailer for the movie using keepvid. I also looked through some of the previous assignments to see what others had done and if there were any tutorials on how to do this assignment. Unfortunately, none of them were using Windows movie maker. But I did get a few ideas of what I want to do.
First, I want to cut out the words already in the trailer. I have a few ideas of words I want to put in to tell the story, but haven’t finalized it yet. Most silent films are in black and white, but I also want to add the “old timey” effect to it. I went and looked at the effects Windows Movie Maker has to offer and found a film age old, older, and oldest. I am going to choose one of those when I upload my clip. Lastly, I am going to cut out all of the sound (it is a silent film) and add a sort of ragtime piano type music. Hopefully, with the combination of all of these tools and effects I can create a modern silent film!
What I did, and I thought it was pretty clever and lead to an overall theme, was I converted all Hurricane Sandy posts to Sandy the Reaper, and gave this overall theme of a serial killer on the loose. My idea with this was to create several different angles. A Maryland woman on the beach anxiously looking behind her. I made it sound like there was a killer tracking her and she could feel the killer behind her. There was another post that gave tips on how to stock up on weapons and prepare for Sandy coming into your neighborhood. D.C. schools would be closed on Monday due to the madness that was ensuing by Sandy’s terror. All of these changes led to a terrified and a very on-edge feeling of this newspaper front page. Especially being constructed out of Washington, D.C., politicians would have much to say about this topic as well.
To complete this assignment, I used the Hackasaurus tool, which can be used in any browser I am pretty sure, but I used it in Firefox just to be safe. Within this tool, there exists what is called the X-Ray Goggles, and these allow you to scroll over elements of the web page you are looking at, and allow you to make edits to the page right then and there. You can view the actual HTML and CSS code while at the same time, seeing what it will look like when completed, which is very helpful. While editing the Washington Post web page, I used the goggles to see the underlying code to whichI would be making changes, and made edits to the text, some of the pictures and so on. I know I could not have edited the raw HTML so I was super thankful to have this tool available. Anyways, enjoy this, and I hope it came out as a pretty cohesive story!
I really enjoyed this assignment because I could take things about my story topic for multiple different sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and so on. I also really liked adding my own input alongside of the input from various people. This was something that I had never done before. I really will consider using Storify in the future for various purposes. It allows me to string together multiple outlets of information, especially ones with different perspectives, which will help create more effective and enlightening stories for readers. Enjoy the assignment I did, featuring Breaking Bad!
