Psh, I work for Emergency Services, who didn’t see this one coming? This assignment is a giant two-fer if you ask me! I get to complete an Assignment Proposal as well as work on my final project. If you read my post about The Final Countdown you could guess that my Final Project relates to emergencies and the like. However, what you can’t see, is that @cogdog opened my eyes to a real story to tell when he said ” Or what if you are something like the EMS that responds to emergencies of cartoon characters? ” with a comment on Canvas. This TOTALLY made me rethink my final project, but here is the revised 911 Call with that quote in mind!
So, What’s Your Emergency? Get creative and tell us!
This is just a little teaser into the rest of the story I hope to tell within the next week about the cartoon emergency. Beware…it may get a little Looney!
Huge props for soundboard.com, soundjay.com, Bugs, and Arnold(yeah he was a little random) for providing clips to complete my cartoon 911 call and a wonderful girlfriend, who also happens to be a 911 Dispatcher, for playing a wonderful role! THANKS!
This assignment is a difficult yet fun one, and can be found right here! The assignment forces you to dig up two different songs that have similar beat structures but are in very different genres, and herein lies the greatest difficulty. Of course audio editing can be tedious and cumbersome, but once the final result is out and hours upon hours are behind you, the feeling of accomplishment is great.
After struggling for a long time with what songs to use in my mashup, I went over to Witt LeFew’s version of the project and was impressed. He did a great job of making the two songs mesh very well, which is not easy to do. He also included a great point in the write up, which is that the songs should have similar beat structures, which is something I hadn’t thought of while in the pre-production process.
For my version of this assignment, I used the songs Lady Madonna by the Beatles, and What I Got by Sublime, two altogether great songs, and also a couple of my favorites.
Lady Madonna
What I Got
Now, here is my remixed version of these two songs, which I worked very hard on.
In this mix I also used a record scratching records sound clip from FreeSound, which was pretty useful.
Now, these two songs aren’t that highly alike in terms of tempo and such, they do have much in common, if you just stop to listen to both for a few seconds each. Both are great songs in their own respect, and as such, I wanted to see how they would fare in a mashup together. At some points it was quite difficult to get the transitions to be smooth, and I hope this doesn’t take away too much from the end result. That being said, it is a pretty tough task to take on, and I worked hard and tried to do the best I could with transitions, and with the points in both songs that I felt would be useful to put together. Anyways I hope you enjoy my final result and feel free to provide criticism and such because I need it! Thanks!
Firstly, this assignment can be found at here, and I certainly recommend it because it is a lot of fun.
For my assignment, I used Drew Barrymore, although afterwards I realized I could have chosen someone else, so I hope this doesn’t affect anything, but I had a good time making this project. I used clips from some of her major movies, including E.T., Scream, 50 First Dates, and Music and Lyrics.
Below I will include the clips that I used.
So again, I could have chosen any actor/actress who had been a child star or started their careers early, but I think Drew Barrymore is such a great example, as well as a great actress, with an interesting past. I started the assignment by going onto IMDB to get a fuller picture of the movies she has acted in, which was also very helpful for the timeline aspect of the project. So after I chose the movies that I wanted to use for my mashup, I went and found the clips on YouTube, which I assume I don’t need to explain how to do.
In order to download the videos from YouTube onto my desktop as MP4 files, I went to KeepVid, which is a pretty easy way to do this sort of thing.
As you can see in this photo here, I copied the youtube video link and pasted it in the bar. After this you want to click on the Download button beside the text bar.
After you click the download button, you will see a pop-up box that asks you if you want to run the application, so you need to click on “Run”. The next step, you will see a screen similar to this…
The best thing to do at this stage is to right-click on the Download as MP4 link, which is highlighted in blue, and click on Download Linked File As, and save to wherever, but it’s easiest to save to Desktop.
The next thing you want to do if you wanted to edit stuff out of the various clips, is open up the program MPEG Streamclip. Using this program you can Trim clips, copy them, cut pieces out of them, take out the audio or video from a clip, and all other sorts of fun things.
Abover you see a picture of MPEG Streamclip open on my computer, and I have highlighted the Open Files option under “Files”, which is one way to open up a clip into the program. Another easy way to do this is to just drag a file from your desktop right into the window where you see the five blue dots. From there you can edit the clip by going to edit, where you’ll find numerous options, such as “Trim, Cut, Copy, Select In, Select Out” and others. The ones that I used for my assignment were the Select In, which is how you select a point in the clip that you want to start from, and Select Out, which is how you end the selected clip. One you have a clip selected you can do a few things:
1) Cut the selection out of the clip that you are editing.
2)Trim the clip to include ONLY the selection.
3)Copy the selection.
So now that you have a pretty good idea of what goes on in MPEG streamclip, it will be useful to learn how to export the edited clip.
Here you see a list of options (although some are grayed out because I am not actually editing anything). The option I used was Export to MPEG-4, which allowed me to export the new, edited clip to my Desktop, which I then imported into iMovie.
This photo above shows you how to import movies from your computer into iMovie. For my project, I did this 4 times since I used 4 clips for the Mashup. As you can see there are two levels, the one on bottom being where the clips import to, and the top representing where the clips for the project go. Once I had each clip imported I dragged them into their appropriate slots up top. One of the major editing things that I did in iMovie was add Fade-Ins and Fade-Outs for the audio to make it flow more smoothly. Below are a few pictures of how I did this..
As you can see next to each option (Fade-In or Fade-Out) there is a little box that says “Manual”. I clicked on this box which allowed me to edit the length of time the audio would either fade in or out, which was useful. It is best to use your own judgement for these types of things, so it really depends what the clip is and how you feel it should sound.
Overall I really enjoyed this assignment because I think that it had a cool idea behind it. In order to really show the progression of Drew Barrymore’s career, and her physical growth, it is necessary to include all of these clips from her movies as a way to illustrate this. I also enjoyed this assignment because it allowed me to experience more video editing, which is challenging but rewarding in of itself.
So after all of this time, it is probably time to show the actual final version of my mashup, so here it is and enjoy!!
Oh boy, I created another one! I’ve seen a few examples of this on the internet now, which kind of sucks because I thought I was being original when I came up with it. I guess it’s true what they say, everything good has already been created (note: not what I actually believe). Anyways, I created the “Inappropriate Laughter” assignment under mashups. It’s important to inject laughter into everything we do, no matter how inappropriate it may be!
I started off by finding a few laugh track clips on freesounds.org. Then it was off to decide on which clip to use. I wanted something that could still be seen as funny in the right circumstances. What better scene than in Pulp Fiction right after Jules and Vincent take Marvin in their car for a ride! Very minor spoilers ahead in the video, so beware.
I started by converting the file to an AVI format from MP4 using MPEG Streamclip. Then it was just a matter of matching up and trimming the audio clips and aligning them in appropriate (inappropriate?) moments in the scene.
In the future, I would recommend using multiple laugh tracks. I only used one throughout the whole assignment and although it creates a certain cheesiness to the assignment, it would still be better with multiple tracks.
WOO! I created my very first assignment today. It’s called, “Where Did the Soda Go?” which was inspired by reddit’s very own board of the same name. This post will also serve as a tutorial of sorts to help you along with creating your very own infomercial screw up!
I started off by using this wonderful compilation of infomercial goofs.
From there, use MPEG stream clip to choose the portion of your video that you would like to be your gif by using the select in and select out features.
Then, go to file -> Export to other formats. Select image sequence in the drop down box at the top that says Compression. Select the box that says better downscaling and select the amount of frames you would like per second. When you’re ready, hit ok.
From here, you have to open all of your files in GIMP by selecting File-> Open as Layers and then holding shift and selecting all of your images.
From here it’s really easy to complete your gif! You just have to go to the filters section of the file bar -> Animation -> Optimize for Gif. Then, just go to filters-> playback to ensure that it plays correctly. Then go to file-> Save. Under file extensions, select the .gif extension.
Then hit the export button! Make sure you check the “as animation” box in the next window.
Yay! You’re done! Here’s my final gif.
Aww man, not my juice!
And there you have it. Don’t forget to have fun with it!
This gif is supposed to show how by day, Obama is merely president of the United States, but by night, he is a superhero. He runs around the White House and the DC metropolitan area stopping crime and destroying sexism. He takes superhero walks with Bo, the First Dog.
I decided I wanted to make a visual assignment that you could do with friends.
This is the description: Take a group of friends of all different heights. Make the photo as creative as possible. Use different locations depending on the meaning you want to send out.
This blog post serves as a tutorial also. First you need a camera. Then you need to get a group of friends that are mostly different heights. This makes the picture more effective. You then need to find an open location that you can hang out in and are able to use your camera. The location also needs to be outside. You then need to make sure it’s a time of day that your bodies will cast a shadow. Then try to be creative as possible for the design you make using your shadows! Creativity is key(:
Write on a “post-it” (haha, get it. “Post” secret.) your biggest dream in life. What are you going to school to accomplish? Who would you like to meet? What is your dream job? Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be a “secret”! Tell the whole internet world! After you take the picture, upload it to flickr and make sure to include the tags!
To do this, I wrote this on a sharpie and took a picture of it with my phone. I emailed it to myself and uploaded it to flickr.
Have you ever wanted to know what happen to your favorite TV show characters before the TV show? For this assignment, download your favorite TV show intro and reverse it.
2/5 stars
For this assignment, I downloaded my favorite TV show intro, Pretty Little Liars, using PWNYoutube. Then I opened iMovie and and imported the clip. From there, I dragged it to the area that says “drag media here”. Then I clicked clip adjustments and reversed it.
Alright I am going to show you how to complete the Product Evolution Video Assignment. For this assignment we will take a piece of technology and make a short video showing the progression of the product through time.
Getting Set Up
We need to pick something to show it’s evolution, this can really be anything but easy ideas would be things like; cell phones, computers, TV’s, or gaming devices. For my video I choose the Calculator.
Gather your time line, this is easy enough to do with a Google search of “timeline history” for whatever product you chose. My search of “Calculator Timeline History” brought me to this timeline.
Now that we have the names of these different types of calculators, found on the timeline, we need Pictures to go with the video. Doing another Google search under images usually produces good results. These are the pictures I will be using.
Now that we have the pictures its time to get them into the type of program you will be using, I will be using Windows Live Movie Maker. First thing once it opens is to import all the pictures we are using by clicking on where it says to “Add Photos” you should also find some music to go along with the video (otherwise it will be a very lame video).
Now that all the pictures and music are added in the next thing we need to do is ensure the pictures are in the right order.
Now everything is ready to go to start making the movie.
Make the Movie
First Thing to do is add the title. something to start off the movie saying what it’s called and the “Production Company.” This can be done by clicking the Title and the Caption button on the Home Screen.
Now while we are doing this we should also add Captions to all the photos, just add the Name of the product and the year it was around. This can be a little tricky to find a color and location that makes it as visible as possible but just play around with it.
After all the captions are placed you have a basic movie, now it’s time to add the desired animations and upload to YouTube.
Then I clicked clip adjustments and reversed it.
