umwsp13 – Assignment Bank

Evil Twilight – ????

View Assignment Details

Another assignment that just… spoke to me: Movie Trailer Mashup.

Take your favorite movie trailer and mash it up with a different trailer to completely change the meaning of the original trailer. For example, if you have a funny movie trailer, give it the sound of a terrifying movie; or vice versa.

It took me a few minutes of thinking, but then I knew the movie trailer I needed to mash up for my own entertainment: Twilight (2008). Who doesn’t like a good spoof?

Now the task was to find a trailer with audio that matched the video of Twilight. I searched a lot of dark, horror films that have come out in the past year, and then found Evil Dead (2013).

You can see both trailers below:

I only had to do a little editing at the beginnings and ends of both clips to have them match up. I tried taking out pieces/speeding up the sound to have it match up better, but it created jumps that stood out far too much for me.

I used PwnYouTube and Windows Movie Maker for this one. Adobe Premiere Pro hasn’t been working for me lately, so I had to work with what I had.

View Assignment Details

My masterpieces

View Assignment Details

In addition to two tutorials, we had to create two brand new assignments to share with DS106.

The first assignment I created is called “Dear sixteen year old, me“! I feel very official having a DS106 assignment out there with my name on it! Basically all you do is write a letter to your 16 year old self and record it. I labeled this as a Video assignment, but I can see it working as an audio assignment as well, especially if you were to create a video with pictures of your high school days and have the recording in the background.

My inspiration came from this video, I know its about skin cancer, but I liked the general premise behind the video and thought it would be fun to write a letter to my own 16 year old self. All I did was record the video in iMovie, edit a little and add a title and credit screen. I gave this 2 stars because it is a relatively easy assignment, but due to the potential video editing and how fancy you get with filming it, I thought 2 stars was appropriate.

Here is my video:

The second assignment I created was another video assignment, entitled “It’s Vacation Time“! I LOVE going on vacation and traveling new places. So I thought it would be fun to have a video assignment to share pictures and memories from our vacations. I gave the assignment 2 stars. I created my example in iMovie, it’s about my trip on a Mediterranean cruise. I even made a tutorial on how to do it.

View Assignment Details

It’s Vacation time! {Tutorial}

View Assignment Details

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make my own assignment “It’s Vacation time“.

First you need to decide what vacation you want to make a video out of and gather all the pictures. I find it easiest to create a new folder on my desktop and save them there, this way they are all together.

Now you are ready to put them into iMovie. Of course, iMovie is on a Mac so I don’t know if this is true for Movie Maker. But all you have to do is click, drag and drop each picture into iMovie.

Next add in your Title and Closing Credit slides (seen here in the orange). To do this, you will select the “T” on the right middle of iMovie and different designs come up. Select what you like.

Now edit the video as you so choose, adding some titles on to the pictures and anything else you want.

Then add some music. I went with “Good Life” by OneRepublic. I already had the song, so I went to iTunes and drug it into iMovie.

The Green line is the music. Make sure to make it fade out at the end, so the music doesn’t stop abruptly. TO do this, click on the gear symbol and edit audio, you can decide how many seconds out you want to fade it.

And from here you are done. Make sure to finalize and upload it to youtube.

View Assignment Details

I Really Used to Love Popcorn

View Assignment Details

But Mozilla Popcorn, doesn’t taste anything like I remember.

Popcorn is supposed to be light, fluffy and easy to eat. This was heavy, clunky, and hard to digest. It isn’t awful, just didn’t make the process any fun. The end result is -eh. at best.

View Assignment Details

I Really Used to Love Popcorn

View Assignment Details

But Mozilla Popcorn, doesn’t taste anything like I remember.

Popcorn is supposed to be light, fluffy and easy to eat. This was heavy, clunky, and hard to digest. It isn’t awful, just didn’t make the process any fun. The end result is -eh. at best.

View Assignment Details

Selena is that you?

View Assignment Details

For my second star assignment I choose Actor Transformation. This assignment was to pick an actor and put to together different clips from through out their career to show how much they have changed over the years.

I immediately knew that I wanted to do a child actor. They seem to be the ones who have the most dramatic changes through out their career. I ended up googling Disney child actors to help me decide who I wanted to do. I ended up choosing Selena Gomez. For those of you they didn’t know Selena (and Demi Lovato) got started in acting from Barney. Since her Barney days she has been on just about every Disney Channel show and is now starting to break off into movies. She has also managed to work pretty consistently since she started so I wouldn’t have to worry about having too much dead time in her timeline.

To show this progression I used Mozilla Popcorn. While I found some issues using popcorn the first time, I decided that I would try to use it again. (I think the fact that I use Firefox helped since Firefox and Popcorn are both made by Mozilla). To start making this video I first went to Selena’s IMDB page and pulled out some significant shows or movies that she had done. I then went to YouTube and started looking for good clips from each of the ones I picked. It took me a bit of playing around to decide exactly which clips that I wanted to use for each.

After deciding which clips I wanted to use, I open Popcorn. When you first start up popcorn it looks something like this:

To get started you simply clip Start a Project. After beginning my project I went ahead and entered all of my clips into my file. To do this you clip on the Media tab and then enter each YouTube link and then click create clip:

After you enter the clip it will appear in the media gallery section listed just below. Here is a picture of what mine looked like after I had entered all of my videos:

I then entered in each clip one at at time. I started off with the earliest clip I had of Selena. I then edited the time of the clip. This can be done by pulling on the arrow circled in the picture below.

After getting the first clip entered how I wanted it, I added the rest of the clips in one at a time each in a separate layer doing the same thing. Do not forget to line up each of the clips so that they are touching like in the example below (I accidentally put one in out of order which is which is why they do not go down in a even diagonal line).

After getting all of my clips in and in the correct order I added in a popup to say what the show or movie was that she was in and what year it was released. You can add in pop ups by clicking the events tab and then the popup tab. (If you have video paused exactly where you would like the pop up to appear you will not have to move it at all which was quite helpful). You then add edit the pop up to say whatever you would like it to say.

Finally I added in a title. I did this simply by adding in a picture (I just used a simple blue background that I got off of google). To enter your picture you select events and then image. After you have the image tag open you simply drag in the picture that you want. I then added words on top of the picture for my title. You can add words by going to events and then text. Here is a picture of what my popcorn looked like with the title placed in:

After adding your clips, popups, and title you are good to go. Just press the save button at the top and you are done!

Here is my final video! Hope you like it:

6 stars down and 0 to go!!

View Assignment Details

Selena is that you?

View Assignment Details

After deciding which clips I wanted to use, I open Popcorn. When you first start up popcorn it looks something like this:

After you enter the clip it will appear in the media gallery section listed just below. Here is a picture of what mine looked like after I had entered all of my videos:

After adding your clips, popups, and title you are good to go. Just press the save button at the top and you are done!

Here is my final video! Hope you like it:

6 stars down and 0 to go!!

View Assignment Details

Poor Leo – ????

View Assignment Details

Leonardo DiCaprio has been in over 20 hugely successful films, and yet he has no Oscar to show for it.

I figured the best way to show my love for his work and to do my assignments was to work on the Actor Transformation mashup.

He’s an amazing actor, and through this video, you can really see it. I mashed up 12 clips from his Oscar-worthy movies. You can see from his first huge success, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), that Leo has incredible skills. The video shows the growth of him as both an actor and a person.

The movies and their respective clips:

1. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) — Clip

2. Romeo + Juliet (1996) — Clip

3. Titanic (1997) — Clip

4. The Beach (2000) — Clip

5. The Gangs of New York (2002) — Clip

6. Catch Me If You Can (2002) — Clip

7. The Aviator (2004) — Clip

8. Blood Diamond (2006) — Clip

9. Inception (2010) — Clip

10. J. Edgar (2011) – Clip

11. Django: Unchained (2012) — Clip

12. The Great Gatsby (2013) — Clip

I threw the last one in there because I just know he’ll be great in it.

How I did it

Wowza did I have a lot of problems with this assignment!

Thankfully, all of the YouTube clips were easily downloaded using PwnYouTube. It’s when I got to MPEG Streamclip that things went downhill.

I have been using MPEG Streamclip for awhile now, but for some reason, the program would not open any of my YouTube downloads.

This was incredibly frustrating so I went to Adobe Premiere to just trim them up in that program. Then that crashed on me every time I tried to open a file. Lacking time this week because of some upcoming presentations and finals, I just decided to use Windows Movie Maker.

It’s not as clean as I normally would like it because Movie Maker just doesn’t have the same options as Premiere. But I made do.

I also have a feeling that I’ll be flagged on YouTube for copyright issues on this one, but I plan to explore my feelings about this much more in my weekly summary.

View Assignment Details

Poor Leo – ????

View Assignment Details

Leonardo DiCaprio has been in over 20 hugely successful films, and yet he has no Oscar to show for it.

I figured the best way to show my love for his work and to do my assignments was to work on the Actor Transformation mashup.

The movies and their respective clips:

1. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) — Clip

2. Romeo + Juliet (1996) — Clip

3. Titanic (1997) — Clip

4. The Beach (2000) — Clip

5. The Gangs of New York (2002) — Clip

6. Catch Me If You Can (2002) — Clip

7. The Aviator (2004) — Clip

8. Blood Diamond (2006) — Clip

9. Inception (2010) — Clip

10. J. Edgar (2011) – Clip

11. Django: Unchained (2012) — Clip

12. The Great Gatsby (2013) — Clip

I threw the last one in there because I just know he’ll be great in it.

How I did it

Wowza did I have a lot of problems with this assignment!

Thankfully, all of the YouTube clips were easily downloaded using PwnYouTube. It’s when I got to MPEG Streamclip that things went downhill.

I have been using MPEG Streamclip for awhile now, but for some reason, the program would not open any of my YouTube downloads.

It’s not as clean as I normally would like it because Movie Maker just doesn’t have the same options as Premiere. But I made do.

I also have a feeling that I’ll be flagged on YouTube for copyright issues on this one, but I plan to explore my feelings about this much more in my weekly summary.

View Assignment Details

The Baby’s Revenge

View Assignment Details

A woman walks down aisle seven in the grocery store. She scans the items on the shelves, looking for a bottle of Gerber peas for her new baby boy. She finds them, goes home, and prepares them for little Joey that night. But Joey didn’t like those peas… The rest of the story ensues.

The story is that of little Joey, who wanted revenge for those damn peas. He hired his little friend Cindy, who waited for Joey’s mom to walk back from the grocery store. As Joey’s mom came by the end of the overpass, Cindy threw a lizard at her face. And that was Joey’s Revenge.

Unfortunately I had to explain this story for anything to make sense. It was really hard to do this assignment when nothing really related, but I did the best I could. Took a lot of thinking and planning to do this. Originally I was going to do a love story between two babies but then I saw the lizard a day or two after I made the plans, and this idea came to mind (I also had the penguin in the grocery store saved).

I made the whole thing in iMovie again. After downloading everything from the sources site, I loaded the pictures into iMovie all at once. Then I took the audio files and loaded them into Audacity. I edited 3 different clips and then exported them into mp3 form. Then I loaded those into iMovie, and slid them into the proper place.