For this video assignment I had to create diary entries as if I were my host character. I decided to create a mystery that Eve had to solve to make it fun.

This assignment was really fun because I actually did one entry a night so it was almost like I had made a digital diary. I decided to create drama with her brother and added in his serial killer tendencies. Unfortunately the sound isn’t very loud and I don’t know why but I actually made it louder than it was so I tried to fix it.

For this video assignment I had to take videos and pictures of moments throughout my day and combine them into a video. I decided to take up the role of my host character Eve Winters for this assignment and documented her day through snapchat.

I enjoyed documenting random moments of my day and combining them all using Windows Movie Maker. Since my host character doesn’t have many friends she pretty much just goes to work and chills in her apartment. I loved that I got to mix up videos and pictures and make a movie out of them because I have never done that before.

For this video assignment I had to a mini documentary on someone. I decided to focus on Dr. Oliver Thredson from American Horror Story because he is such a dynamic character. I decided to focus the beginning of the video on the kind man who is portrayed through most of the season. However, the end of the video focuses on the mad man who calls himself Bloody Face.

I really enjoyed doing this assignment and am glad that my 8 hours of work on it turned out amazing. I only used audio and video clips from the show and organized them how I wanted them. I realized halfway through this assignment that it would have been easier to just talk about the character but I knew I could manipulate the audio clips I chose to send the message and decided to keep going. I ended up using both Windows Movie Maker and Audacity for this assignment and really like how it turned out.

The long awaited Spooksography.  I want to keep Spooksy a bit mysterious, so I kept this pretty light.  From the beginning I had in mind a picture of a baby eating himself, because that’s just so Spooksy.  I wanted to touch on some of the parts about Spooksy that I wrote up when I initially created him, but haven’t been able to do much with, so I wanted something in the video about the war he never fought.  A few of the things I wrote about Spooksy haven’t been introduced in any of my other work because they don’t translate well into non-video formats, so it was nice to be able to touch on some of those.  I wanted to show Spooksy, but this came with the challenge that I have no picture of him in my mind, so I just went with the creepiest dude I could find on google images (I searched for fat beared old man).  This was also a good chance to touch on the mansion, which I’ve mentioned a few times, but never been able to visualize.  My initial concept had some crayon drawings Spooksy did as a child, but I ended up cutting them, as I don’t want to give too much away.  Let’s just say, they offered some great character exposition.  I hope they get a chance to show up later.

When I started writing the script for this assignment, I was having a conversation with myself, like the assignment intended.  When thinking about the challenges associated with the filming I said to myself, it would be easier if I had my girlfriend read one part, why didn’t I think of that before?  I wrote the rest of the script, filmed it, and then looked back at the assignment and realized… I made a mistake, because I was supposed to play both parts.  But… the video was really good.  The story was good, the feeling the video had was good, and it really worked the way I made it.  So I’m left with a choice, do I submit something that really isn’t even the assignment anymore, but is in itself a better story?  Or do I re-film it and turn in something that’s more technically accurate, but of a lesser quality?  I’m putting myself out on a limb here, and betting on the story.  Technically, this is not what the assignment was, but I think it’s better for it.  I said in one of my earlier posts I don’t want to directly associate Spooksy with the horrible things he does yet because I want him to be likable.  Once we see him hurting someone, that goes out the window.  I think one of the scariest things about him is you could see yourself hanging out with him, even though he’s a monster. Because of that, I wanted him to get a little more creepy, and elude more to his bad side, without ever quite making it real to the audience. I set out to make this lovable funny Spooksy, but also very unsettling and creepy.  I wanted to elude to some behind the scenes things he has going on that motivate him to be who he is.  I wanted to do all that, but still have you think he’d be fun to hang out with.  I think that’s very much what I’m turning in.

So I did a few new things with this video, I used Open Broadcast Software to record an active computer window (free program, easy to use, would highly recommend), and I added a title and did narration in movie maker.  The title was super easy, I’ll probably use that again, unless I decided to create a title plate in paint.NET, but the narration wasn’t so great.  It was difficult to work with the file after the narration had been done.  Every time I wanted to cut a scene, it tried to delete the whole audio track with it.  I eventually realized you have to split the audio track separately in order to delete a scene, which is a bit cumbersome.  Also, the quality is HORRIBLE.  Yes, I’m using the built in mic on my laptop for this assignment, but I’ve used it before in Audacity and it sounded much much better.  There’s a big hissy white noise sound going on in the background, and it picked up a bunch of ambient noise.  I may have to look into recording narration A) with the better microphone, or B) in audacity and importing, which I’m not even sure it possible.  Movie Maker is also starting to feel a bit limiting too.  It’s not as feature rich as I would like it to be, and I felt my cuts could have been more precise than the software allowed me to make.  I guess you can’t complain about a free video editing software though.  As for the content, originally I wanted to find a show with a child cooking and comment over that, but the whole idea seemed a bit too creepy.  I’m not opposed to making people uncomfortable, in fact, I think it’s a great device for story telling, and I enjoy it very much in the media I consume, but I am walking a thin line when it comes to creating content for a class.  While no one has set any specific limits that I’ve seen as to the content I create, it just seems like it would be a bad move to stray too far beyond the boundary of good taste.  Also, I enjoy the fact the Spooksy is very likable, despite his bad habits.  I feel like if I make those habits too real, he’ll lose a bit of the rapport he’s built.  If I’m going to do that, it should be in Spooksy’s final appearance.

I liked this assignment because it was right up the alley of everything I’ve done previously with video editing, which is editing competitive game footage of myself into montages with musical accompaniment.  This video is one of the first ever videos I made, and I’ve learned a lot from the mistakes I made making it.  That’s why I think it’s a good subject for this assignment, because when I made it, I thought it was the best thing in the world, but now it’s hard to watch because I see all the things I could have done better.  When I uploaded this, I didn’t even know how to put things on YouTube in HD, which is painfully obvious.  I’ve since learned their formatting and time restrictions for HD upload, and my newer videos benefited greatly from it.  This video is also very looooooong, and most that have viewed it say it doesn’t hold their attention the entire way through.  This was hard to hear at first, as my highlights are like my children, but it taught me this:  Just because you like it doesn’t mean other people will.  Others don’t have the personal connection to the moments in this video that I do, and thus can’t appreciate it on that level, to them it’s just minutia.  While I love this video, it would have been much better received if I had trimmed it down to about 4-5 minutes of the very best I had to offer.  I got too emotionally attached to this work, and it suffered for it.  Also, I think commentary with music in the background would have gone a long way to enthrall the more casual viewers who aren’t familiar with the game, and probably have no idea what is actually going on in some parts.  I also could have credentialed myself more at the beginning of the video to entice people to take it seriously.  I was, for a time, one of the top ranked players in the world.  I have attached screen shots below showing me in 4th place world squad score, and 5th place world obliteration wins.  I had these screen shots then, why didn’t I include them?

For this video assignment I had to find a video clip that I like and create an instant replay of the video clip. I decided to use my favorite soccer clip of Mia Hamm’s 108th international goal in 1999. I love this goal because it broke the record for most international goals scored by a single player. Mia Hamm ended her amazing career with 158 international goals and inspired many girls, including myself, to play soccer.

I enjoyed making this video because I have watched this clip many times and never liked the way they had done the instant replay so I got to make it my own. Overall, I enjoyed making this video and learning how to use Windows Movie Maker.

For my second video assignment of the week, I chose to do the Signing Words assignment. It’s a four-star assignment, bringing my total for the week to eight stars. Here are the directions:

This assignment requires you to take a video of yourself or someone else and finger spell a word or a phrase in Sign Language alphabet and let others guess what you have spelled. Make sure you do a word that is bigger then 5 letters so you can learn some of the letters.

I chose a word that’s relevant to my work today. See if you can figure it out.

To start off, I chose a word related to today. I didn’t want to do something completely obscure. I used my iPhone to take a short video, emailed it to myself, and then opened it in Window Movie Maker. I ran into an issue right off the bat. As you can see in the screenshot below, my video was rotated 90 degrees left of where it needed to be.

To fix this, I googled around and found this link. I’m not proud to admit this, but I actually just completely missed the button that’s even visible in the screen shot above. It ended up being very simple…Moving on!

I added two title frames, to introduce the movie and give the name of the assignment, and two credit frames, to say that I created it and name the song I used. I wanted to add some music (because a silent video like this would be weird), but I knew the video was short, so I needed something that got to the point quickly. I decided to use “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes. It has a catchy tune right out of the gate and most people know it. Windows Movie Maker automatically cut the song to the length of the video, so I didn’t have to worry about that, but I did add a fade out to help the ending not be so abrupt.

Here’s what my project looked like at the end.

This is the first of my two video assignments for the week. I chose to complete the Classical-Modern Mashup assignment. It’s a four-star assignment. Here are the directions.

Ingredients:

1 piece of classical music

1 modern music video

How to make:

First, strip or mute the music out of the modern music video. Then layer the classic music on top.

Voila! Some hopefully hilarious, weirdly sexual classical-modern mashup.

Here’s what I ended up with. I think it works pretty well.

(My internet is crapping out and I’m not able to upload the video at this moment. This is where it will be as soon as I am able to upload it.)

My first decision was which music video to use. I don’t listen to much modern music, so I really haven’t seen many modern music videos. I asked my girlfriend for an idea and she suggested I use the music video for “Chandelier” by Sia. I actually had seen this music video (because she showed it to me) and I think it’s completely ridiculous. I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved because the dance just looks silly to me. So maybe touching it up with some classical music will help it be a bit better. I searched online for some classical music and listened to a couple different songs, but I decided that something a little weird would be better than something dramatic or moving. I ended up choosing the 2nd movement of Maurice Ravel’s “String Quarter in F Major.”

I found the video on YouTube and then used http://www.clipconverter.cc to download the video as an .mp4 file. I used the same site to download the song, but that file was saved as an MP3. I opened it in Windows Movie Maker and got to work on removing the audio. I’ve never used Windows Movie Maker, so I had to look up how to do this. I found this site, which gave me the following directions:

These directions weren’t perfect, but they did get me on the right track. I was able to upload both the video and the song, cut the end point of the song by selecting an option on the right-click menu. I used the Audio Mix option (seen in the top left of the screenshot below) to make sure only the song’s, not the video’s, audio played. To add the introduction credits, I used some of the options shown in the screenshot below to add a couple frames and set the text. I also shortened the duration on some of them because they were just too long.

I uploaded the video right onto WordPress and embedded it above. Voila! Finished assignment!