The final video task I chose from the video assignment bank is the watching movies with the stereo on assignment, which requires you to take a clip from a movie, remove the audio, and add audio from a song that fits. My initial reaction when reading the assignment was to choose a high intensity shooting scene and pair it with a powerful song, and that is exactly what I ended up doing. The film I chose is The Boondock Saints, which I mixed with the song “Know Your Enemy” by Rage Against The Machine. In this particular scene, two brothers are ambushing members of the Russian Mafia via the ceiling of their hotel room.
To complete this assignment, I used clipconverter to download the initial youtube clip from the film, and the used iMove to edit the video. Once I had the clip loaded into iMovie, I detached and deleted the original audio, and loaded “Know Your Enemy” straight from my iTunes. Here is a shot of my workspace.
The one difficult task was matching the moment when the two fall from the ceiling with the part of the song where the intensity really picks up. Eventually I got the timing right, and here was the result:
I downloaded the clips with KeepVid and cut them down into sections of approximately one second each with MPG Streamclip. I deleted the audio from the clips from Alias and Torchwood, as it was random bits of speech and then I imported the clips into iMovie and put them together. I added the audio track then the opening title card and the credits, using the Eurostyle font in the credits before publishing it to YouTube.
I chose this assignment because I did not actually know what an archetype was. When I found out, I was quick to decide to use the Bad Ass Female archetype, as I have studied and talked about it in some of my Gender Studies classes. Katniss Everdeen was the first character that fit this mold to come to mind, but after some thinking and googling, I came up with the rest of the characters to use and quickly went about finding clips of them.
The only thing that I wish I had done differently was to add sounds to the clips of Sydney Bristow and Gwen Cooper. I was not sure how to do it or how to find the right sounds for the clips, since I actually do not often watch action films or television shows.
Despite the sound issue, I am proud of my work and enjoyed doing the assignment.
Almost a month ago we had an assignment to make some Foley sounds for a section of the Charlie Chaplin video “A Lion’s Cage“. I was responsible for the section between 2:31-2:55. I made my sounds and (at the time) they matched up with the video just about right.
Fast forwards this this week and we had to put all the sounds together with the video. The first step to this assignment was to download it from youtube and convert it to an MP4, I used my favorite KeepVid program to make this happen. I then put it into iMovie and removed the audio from it. I went to each of the sections 1,2,3,4,5,6. Initially when i went to Section 6 (which was my timeframe) nothing was there, which was very confusing. Long story short, I somehow saved my foley into section 2. I felt terrible, because I know people made their videos without section 6. But as I’ll explain later, it might have been for the best.
I picked which sounds I wanted to download.
Section 1: Karissa
Section 2: Brooke
Section 3: Dylan
Section 4: Kristen
Section 5: Cole
Section 6: Me Ended up using music
After downloading them i started to put them into iMovie. They all matched up so perfectly (great job everyone). Then I got to my section… OH THE IRONY. I couldn’t get my part to match up at all. I have no idea why, because like I said, it matched up when I made it a couple weeks ago. It was extremely frustrating, we are talking I was ready to punch a wall and cry at the same time (promise I’m not a violent person!). So I just decided to add music to the scene, the original music that was played during 2:31-2:55 and it worked great. At this point i just had to add a title and credits. Here’s my work in iMovie:
And here is the movie, itself:
So here’s the story:
It was a hot summer day and the circus finally had a day off. Mufasa (the lion) has happily basking in the summer heat and planned to snooze all day long. He fell into a deep sleep and began to dream… He heard footsteps and door slams and then he saw a man with a mustache and crazy hair just standing there with a bewildered look on his face. Mufasa heard a dog bark, a women’s voice saying “are you okay?” It sounded like they were whispering and then he heard water splashing. At this sound, Mufasa woke up and realized that this wasn’t a dream, but there really was a man in his cage. But he was still sleepy, so he stumbled over and sniffed the man. Yuck! He smelled like elephant poop. Mufasa couldn’t be near him a second more and decided he really just wanted to sleep, so he laid down and rolled around until he got comfortable; he then drifted off into dream land again, or so he thought. He heard the woman and man speak again, he heard the door open a bit and the open say “what are you doing? That’s a real lion, you need to get out of there.” At this point Mufasa heard footsteps coming toward him. He looked up and starred at he elephant poop smelling guy in front of him. Mufasa was just trying to get some sleep on his one day off and he was not getting that. Mufasa was mad. So he did what lions do best. He left out a big ROARRRRRRRR! That sent the elephant poop guy flying out of the cage and the women shut the door immediately after. Finally, Mufasa was able to sleep in peace.
The End!
I hope you enjoyed my take on Charlie Chaplin’s The Lion’s Cage!
The next assignment I chose to tackle was the movies by numbers assignment, which required that you create a video that, “represents a single number in an artful way.” I scanned through some of the previous works done and did not see any on the number three, so I went with that. My goal for the assignment was to not explicitly tell the viewer what the reference to the number three was, but rather for them to figure it out on their own. I thought that would make the video a bit more interactive, rather than just simply showing the viewer exactly why each image represents the number three. Some of the references include Three’s Company, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and a “Three hour tour”.
To bring this assignment to life I used Google Image searches to find all the photos used, and again used iMovie compile them all. To go along with the theme of three, the audio I chose for the clip was “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley. I really enjoyed coming up with clever references to the number three, and although it took a long time, I am proud of the result.
For my last video assignment, I completed “I am Me” This 4 star assignment is just a video that represents you. There was only one example listed and it was a girl making some silly faces, so I thought this would definitely be fun to do, thought I didn’t make any fun faces!
I made a video intro and closing and just added a bunch of pictures with captions. This video was all about me afterall, and I’m not a huge fan of hearing my voice on playback and I figured everyone would enjoy looking at pictures more than hearing my voice anyways. I went with four different categories “I love…” “I am obsessed with…” “I love to travel” and “Sometimes I.” In each category, I add a bunch of pictures of people, things, and places. I also added to lists “My favorites” and “Not a fan of.” In addition to those two lists, I added a fun fact about myself.
For the music I chose two songs that I really love right now. First is Taylor Swift’s song “22,” in addition to liking the song, I am 22 years old and I thought it would fit in the video perfectly. The second song is “Ho Hey” by the Lumineers, but the version I used is a cover by Lennon and Maisy Stella who are real life sisters and actresses on the ABC tv show “Nashville.” I heard their cover on the show the other night and instantly feel in love with it!
I pulled the “Ho Hey” cover from Youtube and downloaded it to a MP3 using KeepVid, I already owned 22. From this point, I just added them into iMovie and set them up how I wanted them to play. I finalized the video and then remembered I forgot to put an intro slide and closing credits. So once I put those in, I finalized the movie again and uploaded it to Youtube.
Once again I had to do two different screen shots so you could see my work in iMovie.
I just received an email from youtube saying that parts of my video (I assume the music, because the pictures are all mine) “are owned or licensed by UMG, but still available on Youtube. In some cases, it maybe blocked.” So hopefully it will still play below. But if you have any issues, please let me know.
PS. I thought I had cut out the initial squirming around I do in the intro clip. Sorry for the error and weirdness.
So far I’ve completed 7 stars of Video Assignments. My next assignment is a BIG one, with 5 stars. I was a little nervous taking on a 5 star assignment, and while it was time consuming it wasn’t to terribly challenging.
My 5 star assignment was a “Return to the Silent Era“. For this assignment, you take a modern day movie trailer and turn it into black and white, remove the audio and replace it with a new sound track.
I chose The Hunger Games movie trailer for this assignment. It is a fairly new movie and I thought it would be a fun movie to recreate as a silent film. So, first I used KeepVid to download it as an MP4 to my computer. KeepVid is my go to for Youtube downloads, I find it the easiest and fastest program to use. From there I uploaded it into iMovie I cropped out parts that were not actual film (ie: release date info, etc).
When I decided to do this project, I looked at examples (which I usually do before fully committing) and the first example took me to Kelsie’s blog and her assignment was AMAZING! That girl is talented! But I read that she got her cue cards from google, so I headed over there myself and found a great choice for my video.
I plugged those into iMovie and added my script. I then went into each clip and transformed it into Black and White and cut the sound. All I had to do was put into the music. I went over to Freesound.org and just typed in Silent movie music. I chose this sound for the majority of the trailer. Then I typed in dramatic sounds and chose this sound because I felt it was perfect for two different parts of the trailer. After those downloaded, it was just a matter of putting them into iMovie and getting the sounds to match up with one another. There are two spots that do not have music, maybe for a couple of seconds. This wasn’t intentional at first, one sound ends and the second is very quiet in the beginning so there is just no sound.
Here is a screen shot of my work in iMovie. I couldn’t get the screen shot in one pictures so sorry for it being split up.
Once I had everything how I wanted it, I just uploaded it to Youtube and you can watch it below. I think it turned out really well and the music fit perfectly! Hope you enjoy.
Do you think you could watch a silent movie? I’m not sure I could, I like to hear the dialogue between characters.
Another assignment I chose to do is the play-by-play assignment which requires you to do a play-by-play commentary of any video. One video I watched recently that had me laughing was this
To do a voiceover of this video I first downloaded the video using clipconverter.
Next, I used Audacity to record my audio. Here is a screenshot:
I then imported my video file into iMovie, detached and deleted its original audio, and put in my own audio. I chose not to to an opening title screen and credits screen for this video because I did not think it was necessary for such a short clip, and I wanted the clip to go immediately into the action. Here is my final product.
For three stars, I chose to do the Sports Mashup Assignment. This assignment called for creating a compilation of great sports within a theme. As an “avid New York sports fan”, I chose to do a New York theme for the montage, and layered Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind over it. The process was fairly simple, as I had plenty of moments in mind, and the brunt of the work was searching through youtube for the best quality videos. After I selected the clips I used Keepvid to download the files to my computer. Once I had all the files I used iMovie to trim and edit the clips. Here’s a screenshot of my screen during the editing process:
One aspect of the final project I am a bit disappointed in is the quality of some of the videos. Several of them were very fuzzy, and I think it took away from the overall quality of the compilation. Anyway, here is the final product.
Ok, so I thought the first 2 video assignments I did were pretty fun..But this one was absolutely hilarious and I loved filming it. The assignment, Public Service Announcement, called to make a PSA on a something we really wanted to make people aware of, or just a goofy, silly topic. Of course, I chose the goofy topic.
Since my roommates have cats, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea of catnip abuse. I started by writing out everything I was going to say, and then I filmed the cats doing those things. Using Audacity, I recorded myself and uploaded Sarah McLachlan‘s song “Angel” to play in the background. That song is so overused in commercials, so I thought it would be funny to put it with something that’s not serious. I used Windows Movie Maker to organize the clips of the cats and then uploaded the audio from Audacity to play in the video. Finally, I uploaded the end video to YouTube! Enjoy!
As soon as I read this title, I knew I wanted to do this assignment. Inanimate Motion calls to create a movie story of an inanimate object. Being at college, I didn’t have too many toys to choose from, BUT, I do love tigers so I have a small toy tiger and my tiger Pillow Pet. I also a small wooden frog as their “friend.”
I really didn’t know what the plot of my story was going to be, so I just started taking photos of the small tiger walking across the table. I decided that the frog would be a “friend” the tiger comes across and pounces on, but then “big brother” comes over and shoos the little tiger away and helps protect the frog.
I chose a song from The Lion King called Hakuna Matata, because in the movie (even though its lions not tigers!), the song represents a fun and playful time.
6/16 stars
I thought this assignment would be a lot harder, but I actually found it to be pretty easy and a lot of fun! I definitely recommend it to anyone who has 15 minutes free time to just goof around!
