This two-star video assignment relates to Janelle’s’ character, Sebastian Crane … clearly I’m #InsaneintheMemCRANE, since this is the second assignment I’ve done with him! He’s just so wonderful :).
Though Sebastian is a keep-to-himself/show-no-emotions kind of guy, I can somehow picture him late at night, in his swanky apartment, bathed in low light in his study as he flips through his favorite piece of literature for the umpteenth time … the one that tells the story of them, the story of his “us”.
This time was a time full of bliss, when he was reassured no harm would ever befall his beloved brother, especially one of the magnitude that he has now unfortunately been fatefully forced to endure … a time when he never thought he would find such refuge in the pages of a simple leather bound scrapbook.
A time when …
“… no one [got] hurt and no one dies and your tears are scared of leaving your eyes.
It has been nagging at me for going on 10 years! Though I am probably no more than about 2 percent Irish, my desire to travel there has been growing more and more fervent the further away I am.
My dad shared with me his love for music since the very day I was born, and one of our favorite kinds was Celtic music. We would tap our feet in unison on the living room carpet as Celtic Thunder’s lively music and intriguing Irish charm bounced off the walls via their annual PBS special. And I remember that day clearly as the day we decided to go there together.
Though we never quite got the chance, I still fully intend to, with my father right by my side through the form of his favorite tunes.
A while after his passing, I decided to one day randomly scroll through his left-behind iTunes playlist, and found this dear little ditty, a Glen’s gem of a jam, “Gentle on My Mind” (which I greatly wanted to use … DARN YOU COPYRIGHT!). It was then I realized that, though he is gone, he is never really that far away. And through the memory of his music and much, much more, I can always
“keep him on the backroads, by the rivers of my memory,
This week I completed the four-star Video Assignment “Narrative Ambience” in regards to Caterina’s mother Alessandra in order to show and further explore her inexplicable lust for Italy, a fervent love that selfishly caused her to place her desires over her family at a young age. Having matured over time, Alessandra has realized just how much she gave up when she chose herself over her true love, her daughter, and has recently been feeling much regret over her utter foolishness. The music I chose (specifically the orchestral suit from the Lizzie McGuire movie, aka, the soundtrack to my childhood), takes the listener from a feeling of joy and adventure at the start of the track to a feeling of sadness mixed with hope by the end of it, the scenes set up to take you along similar peaks and valleys. I paired the track with e.e. cummings’ “I Carry Your Heart With Me” and picked out the most effective lines that encapsulate Alessandra’s daily musings, almost a mantra that is continuously on her mind as she embarks on her daily adventures. Though Cat is under the impression that she herself was the cause for her mother’s swift departure, the reality is that she was actually at odds with Wally and the progressive route he was taking when it came to his career. Missing out on Cat’s life has been the equivalent of her missing half her heart, and she wonders if one day she’ll ever get it back though.
For now though, she will simply wonder as she wanders.
(PS: I hope you enjoy all this lovely footage of Italy, filmed by yours truly! Isn’t it magical?! Like my own Disney Channel Original Movie :D)
I picked this 4.5 star assignment and I did in on the character of George Bozo, he is Barbara Hall’s 1940’s character. I read everything I could about George and I made a PowerPoint and converted it to a WMV file so that I could post it on YouTube. I picked a song that I thought fit him. I like how it turned out.
Way back when when we first wrote our character dossier, I had already been thinking of other characters that were a part of Cat’s life, past or present. And since this week we had to do assignments that broadened our own character’s story, brought in those of others’, and helped us further embody our character in all that we continue to create, I chose to do the five-star Video Assignment in which I at long last gave a face and a well-deserved “Special Person Montage” to Beauregard Dasher, the only man Cat has left in her life (as far as she knows ...).
This required me picking out all Teen Wolf scenes with Dylan O’Brien in them, whose lovely features served at the visual inspiration for Beau (… of COURSE it wasn’t a coincidence; how DARE you insinuate that! ;)], as well as the scenes that encapsulated the casual friendship-slash-almost a relationship that the TW characters Stiles and Lydia have experienced throughout past seasons. From the beginning my entire story has been largely inspired by the MTV supernatural drama Teen Wolf (I admit it :D), so again, this often hilarious, really endearing dynamic between their two characters directly mirrors that of Cat & Beau.
Before I get into all my usual wordiness, it’s important that I provide some specifics about how I went about this whole “picking out” thing. I went through Seasons 1-3 of Teen Wolf online, skipping around to the juicy stuff, and then accessed the “Screen Recording” feature of my computer’s QuickTime Player. This allows you to record either the entire Desktop of your computer, perhaps like you might do when showing someone a step-by-step how to. It also allows you to record just a portion of your screen, which is exactly what I did to obtain the pertinent scenes. The great thing about using the Screen Recording is that it only records the video, not the sound, so it made it easy to add the music towards the end of the process instead of having to spend all day tomorrow doing a massive amount of sound editing. I’m thinking this would be a great assignment to do a tutorial for since Video Week is encroaching upon us!
Then all you gotta do next is trim about an hour of clips down to three-and-a-quarter minutes — ya know, no biggie; just a casual Friday — and figure out what story you’re actually trying to tell. But how about first, you see the story for yourself?!
This assignment actually helped me better solidify the backstory of Cat and her father who, given his biochemistry background, would be better suited in the field of pharmaceuticals rather than simple weaponry. Wally Loveless was very intelligent and well-traveled, and so he really strived to make revolutionary accomplishments in the field of medicine to “help those who [could not] help themselves]. In fact, he was always working, so much so that Cat didn’t see him as much as she grew older. Additionally, some of their fellow New Orleanians believed all the advancements were frightening and they should keep things simple, Southern, and homegrown, so there was many a disagreement. This led to Cat being viciously and ominously attacked on the night of their junior ball, perhaps an attempt by some of Wally’s opponents to really him spooked. However, Beau and Cat always had a close connection, and he knew something was amiss when she didn’t come back from her quick dash out for air, dashing after her just in time.
Due to trauma, they weren’t sure that Cat would wake up, but the strength that Wally helped instill in her from day one never wavered, and she prevailed. Only a year later, however, was that fateful day that Wally, one of the few times he was the one under the knife, never came back out from under it. And as per usual, Beau was with her every step of the way; through the highly publicized and spectated-about funeral and through the residual sadness that I know for a fact doesn’t come until afterwards … Boy, could I have used a Beau! Isn’t he lovely?! … swooping in to save the day with a roll of TP just when his leading lady needs it the most, lol :D.
From that point on, Cat really depended on Beau … however much she wanted to be independent, Beau’s unwavering loyalty, genuine concern, and tender care drew her closer than ever … close enough that, on the night of her prom, after having wandered down the halls together, Cat really surprised herself, and him! Things remained unspoken yet steadfast as their final year together came to a close. Then the end of summer rolled along, too soon as always, and Beau rolled away towards unknowns still mysterious to Cat. Hence the often melodramatic yet totally necessary “Fade To Black” to end, the video coming full circle since the focus begins and ends on Beau’s baby browns.
It certainly was no small feat, but I’m glad that I did this assignment, as it helped me realize I have some serious editing to do to my character dossier! And for all my fellow Wolfies out there, I hope this helps us get through our Teen Wolf withdrawals together :D.
So this post is dedicated to my creating of a video assignment and completing of that video assignment. The video assignment I created Create A Lyric Video. The goal of this is to take a song and create a video displaying the lyrics for it. That may sound easy but it should be creative, adding many transitions in small sets of lyrics, not just displaying long sets of lyrics. The song that I chose to do this assignment on was Bust A Move by Young MC. I chose this song, because I really like the lyrics. I think they’re very comical and this song is a good hip-hop/rap song that includes no cursing in it. Along with this, it is also a classic that I feel like many people know and can rap along with it.
To create this video, I simply used iMovie. I didn’t feel I needed any clips so I just used a bunch of backdrops and added text for the lyrics in the foreground. The hardest part of this assignment was finding out what lyrics to put where. I generally utilized having a line displayed at a time, followed by some sort of transition to the next line. Depending on the tempo and lyrics, I would make some changes from this to make it look better and more creative. So, if you would like to see my video you can find it here:
I think I did a really good job on this assignment. All the lyrics appear to be right, and I feel that the cuts, transitions, and timings are very precise having the lyrics be displayed at the same time they are announced in the song. I decided not to do the whole song, this was just because I didn’t want to violate any of YouTube’s copyright policies. I still believe the minute and a half that I did really captures the idea behind this assignment.
Til next time everyone. If you want to check out this assignment you can find it here. Til next time everyone!
This was the required assignment this week. I think it had a really funny background but to actually do it was impossible.
I was a little too time cramped this week to do it during the week. Plus I also saw how hellish it was for other people to complete.
Instead of putting myself through that agony I chose to do something more simple for my conversation with myself.
The background to my video was that I always am hungry before bed. It causes some issues. Sometimes I cannot go to bed unless I eat something. Science tells us how bad this is. It makes you gain weight and have gas… all the things that uncomfortable.
So I have to ask which is the lesser of two evils? This is the background to my video. I chose like “Devil” figure and an “Angel” monologue.
We all have those little voices in out heads that tell us what to do. For my video, the bad influence won and I ended up eating the crackers.
The last video assignment I have completed for the week is Have A Conversation With Yourself!The goal of this assignment is to make a video where it appears you are having a conversation with yourself. To do this assignment, I need to film my videos that would include the dialogue of me talking to myself. This was not too simple though, this being because I needed to plan my timing out well on when to say things so that it would appear that I was contributing to the conversation on time and appropriately. To do this, I counted the time in-between lines so that the lines would match up and appear as though it was an actual conversation.
After I had recorded all my video for this, I decided to use iMovie to edit my video. To do this, wasn’t too difficult, this being because iMovie has a simple effect that allows this clone effect to be created, and there are plenty of tutorials and videos online explaining how to do this. The way I did this was, I dragged the first clip of one side of the conversation that I would like to use. After that, I highlighted the second part of the conversation and dragged it on top of the first clip, at the spot I wanted it to start. After I dropped it there, a pop-up toolbar popped up, giving me a multitude of options for what to do with this clip. Some of these options being “blue screen”, “green screen“, “insert”, “replace”, etc. The effect that I needed to choose from here was green screen, not necessarily because I am using a green screen, but because this is what makes the effect work. From here, I click the crop button and change the boundaries so that the half of the screen that one of my characters stands on is highlighted. Now, two me’s are sitting next to each other, having a conversation.
The next step of this editing process was to make sure the lines in the dialogue fit together well. And they did for the most part, the only thing I really needed to do was remove about 0.2 seconds from one of the clips. After this, due to the fact that I had some curse words in my video, I needed to add my expletive bleep sound effect to my video. To do this, I simply downloaded it from freesound.org and simply added it to the area I saw fit in the video. From here, the only thing I needed to do was add my opening and ending credit slides, and boom! It’s all finished.
Overall, I really liked this assignment. It definitely stretched my video editing skills. It also helped me plan out a script and my planning really well. I’m glad I did this assignment, because I learned a lot more about how to accomplish this really useful and neat effect within iMovie. So finally, here’s my video:
For another one of my video assignments I decided to do a video montage of my memories. The original assignment was to do a video montage of your high school memories but I decided to go beyond that and include some of my college memories as well.
I loved this assignment because it made me realize how far I’ve come as an individual. High school was not the best time in my life but I overcame it and made my way to Mary Washington. I liked this assignment because it made me think of my past memories.
I knew right off what song I wanted to use. “Story of My Life” by One Direction was the perfect song to chose because it tells the story of going through life and the changes and obstacles we go through. I think it was an appropriate chose in a song.
To make this video I took photos from Instagram, Photobucket, and Facebook and dragged them on my desktop. From there I imported them into iMovie and put music to it. It was fairly simple. iMovie is a great tool to have when dealing video production.
This week I got to reunite with my radio show biddies to do a group swede. Kisha found some good scenes from upcoming episodes for us to recreate. With scripts in hand we met at the Fredericksburg Bus Station to film. We recreated a scene from episode 5 of Season 4 of The Wire and a couple of scenes from episode 6 of the same season. Over lunch we created the credits using an app on my phone and set them to the opening and ending songs of The Wire. Once I got home combined everything we had filmed with actual clips from The Wire and the credits in iMovie and this is what we ended up with.
… swooping in to save the day with a roll of TP just when his leading lady needs it the most, lol :D.