My time in High School was the some of the best years of my life and I owe that all to being in band. I was a percussionist in my high schools band and I played anything from cymbals to bass drums and everything in between. This video is the story of my high school life. Enjoy!
This is a 4.5 star video assignment for Ds106 titled High School Memories. It was created by downloading some youtube videos my friend had of our schools drumline and then picked some pictures I took during my high school years. I then downloaded the mp3 from my bands 2009 performance and edited that in behind the slideshow to create what you see here.
This week, I completed the That Bleeping Censor assignment, which was worth 5 stars! FIVE!!
You get to be the censor of a movie scene or clip. Choose a sound effect or dialogue you want to substitute for a recurring phrase or expletive, or over-used character speech and use it at the appropriate moments in your movie. This is five stars, so you need a movie scene or clip longer than 2 minutes.
For this assignment, I wanted to contrast something that you would not necessarily think as being bleeped, with the actual Censor bleeps. I settled upon a clip from Despicable Me. There was also the challenge of finding a clip that was at least 2 minutes long, that had repetitive words that would be good for censoring.
In order to add the bleeps, I imported the mp4 file into Audacity, generated tones for each word or phrase that I wanted to censor, and then muted the original track, so you wouldn’t be able to hear the words over the bleep. When the bleeps were originally created, they were all a lot louder than the actual audio, so I had to de-amplify of them.
Once the audio was to my liking in Audacity I exported it, and then opened the video clip in iMovie, removed the original audio and added my edited audio. I also had to watch the clip a few times to make sure the audio lined up, and the bleeps made sense. See if you can try to tell what word I bleeped out!
For 3 stars this week, I completed the Chipmunk Style assignment.
Helium may be in short supply, but a little digital tweaking can still leave your favorite actors sounding like the Chipmunks. Take a clip from a film and either speed up the action or raise the pitch on the audio track for some high-pitched laughs.
I didn’t really know where to start, but I thought it would be funny if the characters had really deep voices in the original or it was an intense moment. I thought Star Trek might be funny, so I just searched on YouTube for a clip, but ended up choosing the trailer instead of an actual clip.
For this particular assignment, I used a Mac on campus, because I know that you can easily separate the audio from the video in iMovie. I’m not sure how easy that is in Movie Maker. I opened the video file (mp4) in Audacity and changed the pitch of the clip, and then exported the clip. Since I was easily able to separate the audio from the video in iMovie, I removed the original audio and inserted my edited clip. Since I didn’t change anything but the pitch, the length of the audio was still the same as the original, so the audio and video lined up perfectly! I really enjoyed completing this assignment, and it’s funny to watch the final product.. Enjoy!
When I was younger, I used to shun all those girls who wore makeup. Especially if they wore it every day. “If they manage to spend so much time on their makeup everyday, I can’t help but think about how poor their grades are” and “I’m not like other girls; I don’t wear makeup.”
I started to come around to it in 10th grade, but it was only the occasional eyeliner. For the most part, actually, I wouldn’t wear makeup just because I didn’t have the time to put it on, and I thought I didn’t look good with it. Then again, I also hated my appearance in general. I hated everything about my face.
Last semester (Spring 2015), I decided I was done not putting any effort into my appearance. I was done having my roommate point out that I wore the same clothes every day, never got dressed, never put any effort into how I looked. I was done hiding behind my hoodie and jeans. Nearly every day last semester, I got dressed in clothes that weren’t hoodies and jeans. I put on makeup. I made an effort to look good.
I’ve been doing that every day this semester too. The funny thing about makeup is that people think you wear it because you’re insecure, or you want to appear fake. I wear makeup because it makes me feel beautiful, and shows me that I am beautiful. I can take off my makeup, I can go without wearing it, and I’ll look in the mirror and think “Wow, I have a nice face!” I don’t think I could do that before.
Makeup lets me dress up and show off those features about myself that I like. My skin, my eyes, my lips; putting makeup on is like putting on real clothes. Sometimes I don’t want to do it, but I force myself to anyway, because I know it’s good for me. And that makes me love it even more, and I’ll get those days where I wake up and decide “I’m going to dress up today!”. I think I’m rambling at this point.
Moral of this post: Makeup rules, anyone who says otherwise sucks, whether or not you wear makeup is your choice and as long as you love yourself everything is okay!
That’s why I decided to film a video of me putting on my makeup this morning, for the Show Me How assignment (4 stars).
Process:
Similarly to my two assignments last week, the only change was speeding up the footage
One of the assignments in the Video assignment bank was to create a “Special Person Montage”. This was a great assignment because I got to make a movie of my special person . . . my one and only grandbaby. What’s a grandma to say ~ I had plenty of material to work with! For this video I used photos and video clips and arranged them by his age. It was a wonderful and emotional day when he was born. Our Patrick Adam. I can’t tell you what it is when he comes in the door and yells, “Grandma” and runs to me. It doesn’t get any better then that. Patrick is only three years old, but he has truly brought sunshine to my life!
One of the assignments I did this week was to take the audio commercial I created a few weeks ago for the radio show and adding a visual element to it. This assignment allowed you to use still clips and arrange them to go along with the audio that was already created. The trick was that the audio could not be edited. This was a great assignment for using my host character since the audio commercial from the radio show was for Esmerelda’s fortune telling services.
Esmerelda was originally created using bitstrips.com where you can create a comic strip using their pre-loaded scenes, characters and props to build your own comic strip scenes. A neat feature of this site is the ability to layer up or down the characters and props you insert into the scene. For this one I was able to put the man seeking fortune telling service outside of the door looking in by picking the scene, inserting the character and dropping him in front of the door, then I selected “layer down” and it popped him just outside the door. To make my comic into a movie I created each comic scene and saved each image as a picture. Because the bitstrip picture had a title bar at top and bottom of the scene I opened each image using Microsoft Paint and then used the fill bucket to make the title bars a solid black. Then I uploaded each image into a movie strip using Windows Movie Maker and added some animation movement. After the movie clip was arranged I added the audio clip, a title and credits page and saved the movie. Again I uploaded the video to my flickr.com account before downloading into this blog. I think it turned out great! Take a look.
This weeks video assignments included a must do mini documentary. My video for this features Kyle Hvisdash telling us about his favorite band of all time. The mini documentary on The Sun City Girls is a story of an eclectic style band so to make my movie in keeping with this I used a movie maker feature to make Kyle look like a pencil character come to life. Kyle does a great job with his audio story and his body language. Kyle is so excited to tell us about he band that it is an interesting story. I filmed Kyle in the laundry room in the basement of my house and used Windows Live Movie Maker for editing. For edits I used a few album cover images for the band and I added a title and credits slide. I also added sound clips from the band which I recorded on Audacity. After all the edits are done you simply save the movie and that’s it. Once again in order to get the video to load into the blog I first uploaded it to my flickr.com account and then downloaded here for your viewing. Hope you like it. I have to admit after hearing Kyle tell his story I was interested to go listen to some of the bands music. No my taste really but it is an interesting story about how this band traveled to India and incorporated sounds they discovered there into the music.
For 4.5 stars this week, I completed the Signing Words assignment, where you must spell out a word using American Sign Language. Since this was ASL related, I took out the audio, and added captions, so viewers can see what I’m signing. For this assignment, I decided to sign my host character’s full name, Sally Slaughterhouse! There were a few repeated letters, so I felt like I was signing the same thing over and over again!
In order to film this, I checked out a GoPro from the Convergence Center, so that’s why the video looks a little like a fish eye.. I used Movie Maker to add the beginning titles, transition, and captions throughout. Since I’m a PC user, using Movie Maker was much easier than trying to navigate and learn iMovie this time around.. Maybe I’ll try iMovie again with another assignment. Anyways, enjoy!
For the Signing Words assignment, we had to make a video of ourselves creating a word in sign language. This is what I made:
We’re supposed to let the viewer guess the word we make. I chose a word that’s a very important thing to do every day, every hour, every minute. Before every action even. It shouldn’t be too difficult, if you do what the signs tell you to do.
It’s something I do all the time, without anybody ever realizing or doing what it says about it. It’s a concept I think is highly relevant to life and your personal identity. This action defines everything about you, so make sure you do it for everything you do.
To make this project, I tried to get my phone at a good angle to capture my hand without my face shown. The point of observation should be the hand, so my face would have just been distracting. It was difficult to find an angle that I could twist my hand into the signs in and get a good camera image on in. Here I put my phone on a table and got on my knees. After filming it, I imported the file from my phone to my computer into Windows Movie Maker. There I added the beginning and ending cards. Since there was some background noise in the video, I decided just to mute the whole thing since sound isn’t important at all to it.
For the 30 Second Documentary assignment, we had to make a 30 second video without commentary as a documentary of sorts. One of the suggestions on the assignment is showing what it’s like to do something you haven’t done before, and another is to show something you are terrible at.
I went with both:
This is me playing my dad’s old (and I mean OLD) acoustic guitar that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been tuned for at least 2 decades. I don’t know anything about playing guitar, so I just did my best to make sounds that could pass as being musical. I made sure to show the neck of the guitar primarily, since that’s what is more important to be looking at when playing guitar. The lighting is less than ideal, since the bright left side is kind of distracting, but I do feel like it makes the important parts stand out.
The story behind me having the guitar is that one of our relatives gave it to my dad a long time ago. So a few years back, I asked if I could have it, and I’ve had it sitting in my room ever since. I’ve always been interested in learning to play, but I think this one is more suited towards folk and country (the strings come up way above the neck), when I’m more of a rock guy. Didn’t think it’d ever come to be of use, but when I remembered I had it the idea to use it for a 30 second documentary quickly came.
To make the video I placed my phone on a table beside me to make a good angle to make the neck more prominent. I didn’t want my face shown since I feel that would distract from the guitar. In hindsight I could have placed myself a little more to the left to center the image a bit. When I finished recording the video, I uploaded it from my phone to Windows Movie Maker. I trimmed the original video to around 30 seconds using the trim tool, and used the default cards and effects to add in the beginning and ending cards.
After that I saved the movie ( a different option than saving the project), and uploaded the .wmv file to Youtube.
