One afternoon, the Fandom Princess was lounging around on her bed, reading a book about a talking rabbit who wanted to be a knight, when she heard three loud knocks at her chamber door. Ghost instantly bounded towards the door and barked. The Princess followed him and opened the door to find that there was nobody there. Instead, placed right on the floor, there was a beautiful bouquet of different colored roses and lilies.

“How sweet,”the Princess said.
She reached down to pick them up and brought them back inside her chambers and into her room she found a little note card that said say the magic words: Tell me of love songs.

She spoke the words, and when she did, the flowers began to suddenly move. Then all in unison, they began to sing in harmony. It was such a beautiful sort of song that the Princess and Ghost both stared at the flowers as it was new treasure. And it was indeed!

She never found out who gave her the singing flowers, but nonetheless, she cared and tendered for them just the same. And for the next few Moon cycles, whenever the Princess was feeling down, or if she was missing her beloved Prince, she would speak the magic words and listen to the lovely flowers sing her songs of love and hope. Well, to kick off this week’s video assignments, I decided to start out easy on myself. Probably the best way to go, since this video stuff is going to prove challenging. Anyway, I decided to start off with an easy 2-star assignment called Lip Synch Your Favorite Song. Now, a little background on this video before I jump into the technical stuff.

My friend Candace is a fan and kind of in love with Ke$ha. Not in the sense that she thinks she’s a good singer or anything like that, thank God, but she likes her style and thinks she’s kind of fun. Whatever, to each his (or her) own. We got bored one day and decided to look up parodies to any of her songs, which is what we like to do a lot of the time. I should add here that I am a big fan of, when I’m procrastinating, lip synching like a fool to songs, so this assignment really was going to be easy.

Anyway, back to the story. We found this video of two girls who had parodied the Ke$ha song “Tik Tok” and it made us die of laughter. We decided that we would try to imitate that video because we loved how the two girls in it were dancing and acting out the lyrics to the song as well as actually lip synching it (we struggled there for a moment with that because we got so caught up in dancing that sometimes we would forget to actually lip synch. The whole process of filming actually took a really long time, let me tell you.)

So, we found some clothes of ours to imitate the two girls, had our other friend, Jane Claire, play the song for us, and also asked if she would be responsible for recording the video for us as well. We next had to practice by watching the video countless times to make sure that we would get everything correct, down to the last action that was going on in the video. We would watch the video, then film a bit, watch it, then film, then, as we realized that wasn’t working out as effortlessly as we would have wanted, we decided to just try and film the whole thing all the way through.

From there, we didn’t really need to edit anything, and we were pretty proud of the end result:

This video tells a story in multiple ways, in my opinion. Not only are we retelling the story that the actual song is telling, but by reenacting the interpretation of the two girls in the parody and adding our own spin on it, we were able to tell a slightly different story that still managed to stay along the same story line!

2 Princess Stars

For my LAST video assignment I did five second film which was worth four and a half stars.  This assignment was to “make a supershort, 5-second film; basically enough time for one gag, bit, or joke.”

My family stopped by to visit this past weekend so I used my sisters to help me make this video.   I decided not to have a set plan for this one because it would have ended up being awkward and not even kind of funny if we had one.  We are plenty goofy enough without having a plan.

To record this video I used the iPhone app vine.  I talked about this app in an earlier post and explained exactly how you used it.

We were celebrating one of my sisters sixteenth birthday while she was here so the reason she has things like a crown and ribbon on is because of that.  She also is in LOVE with One Direction (which she will hate me if she knows I shared that on here) so she got a preteen magazine all about them as one of her gifts.  The five second video I ended up recording was her reading a part of an article out of her magazine about them.  After her reading that I took a short video of my other sister and my friend who were in the room which I think is what sells the video.

Hope you enjoy it!!

That’s seventeen and a half stars!!

For my next video assignment I did song visualization which is worth two stars. This assignment was to “pick a song (or a minute from a song) and create a video that displays pictures that tell a story with the lyrics.”

For my song I picked Red by Taylor Swift.

I chose this song because I love Taylor obviously and because there are a lot of great visualization in this song.  She is very literal with her explanations through out the song which I knew would be great for making a visualization video.

To start this assignment I first picked with part of the song I wanted to do.  I decided to just simply start with the beginning and go for about a minute. This put me with the first verse and the chorus.   I then started google image searching to find pictures that would work out well for each part of the song. Some of the pictures were super easy to find like the colors but some where a bit harder.  I had to be creative to find a picture to represent things like feelings and emotions.  In the end I pretty happy with what I found (even if some are a bit obscure).

After finding all my pictures I then upload them into iMovie in the order of the song.  I then put in the song and started cutting the pictures so that they would match the lyrics at the right time.  For this assignment I didn’t have too much trouble with the cutting and editing because I have done it quite a few times now.

Here is my final song visualization for Red by Taylor Swift:

Thirteen stars down and three to go!

*work in progress!

I really enjoyed this assignment just because it involved doing a recording and over the course of DS106, I have gotten extremely comfortable infront of the camera! This assignment is called I am me, and you’re suppose to make a video that represents you to your fellow DS106′ers through whatever means necessary (videos, pictures, etc.). I decided to make an intro video but also follow the example given, and use some photos towards the end. I used iMovie as my means for making this project, and since I’ve been toying around with it for awhile, I’m getting used to more and more with each use. I had re-record a couple of times because I kept laughing to myself but it got easier after awhile. Next time,though, I think I will truly test my skills and see if i can take my all my snipbits and make a full video from them? I attempted that buuut it didn’t exactly work out. However, I still managed to make a complete video for this assignment! I also decided to get a little fancy and add a soundtrack to the video montage (Who Says?) This video assignment was worth four and 1/2 ?’s, which is understandable since it involves recording yourself but also being creative with adding in features (like a recording and photos!). The best part is that Youtube didn’t try to stop me this time from uploading it! (surprise, surprise!) Here is my I am me video!

My next assignment was Thumps Up for Ebert from the assignment bank. Usually, I don’t do assignments like this one, but it seemed interesting.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I would go with my tribute to Roger Ebert who passed away recently, so I started by browsing around on his site. I found this page about some of the best movies of the past 100 years. I figured this would be a fun way to pay tribute to him–string together some clips of the movies and some of his reviews of them. I picked three, Contact (1997), Fargo (1996), and Pulp Fiction (1994). I originally wanted to do more, but there were so few clips of the reviews of other movies I wanted to do, that I decided three would have to be enough.

Click here for links to all the videos that I used

I trimmed up most of the clips to make sure they were relevant and only snippets of the review. I didn’t want it to just repeat the actual reviews.

I think these three movies–and Ebert’s love for them–show his range of tastes. I think movie critics are often focused on one genre they like and hating all the others that aren’t “intelligent” enough. Ebert’s reviews of these three distinct films shows that he was not one-dimensional at all.

Once again, I used Adobe Premiere Pro.

I hope I didn’t go too far off the assignment’s description. I thought about showing the funny side of Ebert (but the clip quality was terrible) or maybe having music in the background (but god, that’s so depressing).

In any case, this is my small tribute to a guy I grew up watching on TV.

*Screenshot of my masterpiece in progress

I honestly do not know how to explicitly state how much I enjoyed doing this assignment! At first, it seemed really easy but not that wrong. However, I was really wrong about both!  It involved taking a music video of our choice (I picked Just  Give Me A Reason!) along with a movie, for which I choose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! We were suppose to integrate the two but not using still shots, and instead using actual videos from the two. Although this seemed easy at first, it was a lot harder because I had to make sure that whenever it would switch back to the actual music video, the voices were in-sync with the words and it was somewhat chaotic but definitely rewarding! I also learned how to iMovie and really learn how to cut/edit/etc.

Also, the actual music video had clips of P!NK and her beau, which I felt took away from the idea with the movie so I used my new amazing skills to cut and clip it so rather than seeing P!NK, it was Clementine and Joel! For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a couple and how  one day they break up, so Clementine(the one with the wacky hair colors!) decides to have Joel erased from her memory with some new surgery. Once Joel finds this out, he decides that he wants to do the same but during it, he decides that he doesn’t actually want to forget about her and he attempts to stop the procedure. Definitely a beautiful movie, which is why I choose the song ‘Just Give Me A Reason’ because all he needed was a reason to believe that it wasn’t over! All in all, doing this as my first assignment was well worth it because it allowed me to learn a lot of the ins and outs of iMovie.

The most frustrating thing in the entire process was uploading it to youtube. When I was finally done pouring my heart and soul into this assignment, Youtube decided to step in and give me this gross page.

I guess it was problematic that I was using online clips, and somehow I was stepping on copyright issues. I tried to re-edit my video but then I realized two things, 1) why should I have to edit and redo my video? The whole purpose of Youtube is for people to upload videos, and I’m not in any way profiting from this video so what’s the big deal in uploading it? Ugh, it was the most frustrating thing ever! I honestly wanted to pull my hair out. Then I realized 2) that I would much rather use a website that allows to me upload things at my leisure and not stress out over whack-tube. Despite Youtube supposedly being for the people, it’s not! I don’t know to which degree people have to make sure that their videos don’t look like anyone else’s and the more I read on the lengths companies go to make sure you don’t use their copyrighted material, it was ridiculous. Honestly. Don’t get so uptight just because I remixed your video! I even put a disclaimer but no luck. So I happily went to Vimeo instead and decided to bookmark this experience. Anyways, here’s my video, which I OWN NOTHING OF EXCEPT THE ESSENTIAL SWEAT THAT WENT INTO MAKING IT! enjoy

For my third video assignment this week I did Inanimate Motion which was worth three stars. This assignment was to take an object that doesn’t move and put it together in a bunch of small clips to make it seem like it was moving.

When I was looking though examples for this I saw that a lot of people were using animals of some kind to make this and I decided I wanted to go in a bit of a different way.  I was in the middle of shipping a package to my friend and decided that I was going to use that as my inanimate object that I would make seem like it had motion.

To record this video I used an app on my iPhone called vine.  This app allows you to record a bunch of small clips just by touching your screen.  You have about seven seconds of video that you can record and each time you touch your screen it records what the camera is facing.  I wished that I could’ve made my video a little bit longer but I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

I started with the empty box and then added a few things at a time.  I wanted it to seem like things were multiplying in the box with each shot that I took.  I then closed the box up and took a video of the box from all its sides to make the box look like it was spinning.

Here is my finished video:

Nine stars down and seven to go!