My next video assignment was super fun to make. Yeah, SUPER fun. I decided to spend my Saturday afternoon in the lovely Downtown Fredericksburg at The Griffin Bookshop and Coffee place. Not sure if that’s the full name but that’s what i call it! I realized i was behind on some of my assignments so i did the “Guess This Book” vine video assignment. It seemed easy enough because i was at a book store. Everything around the store seemed to be really Holiday themed so i wanted to pick a holiday book. Now, it’s not something you’ve read in a while (unless it’s a family tradition) but it’s something you loved in elementary school! At least i did. It’s also been made into many plays. I went to go see it in middle school and i actually fell asleep watching it. Now, that’s not to say it was a bad play. I was just really tired. It was too early to be sitting in a dark theatre. Point being, as you can tell, there was a long thought process when choosing this book. Now, the hints i’m using aren’t necessarily the BEST, so i added in some easy ones towards the end. Then i did a small snip it of the author himself. Yeah, it’s a guy. That narrows it down pretty well! I had the help of my lovely friend Danielle. She drew the creature and did the noise following the creature. So in the comments, tell me what you think this book is! Have fun and think HARD.

Guess this book! https://t.co/rHb9vdoh60 via @vine

— Carmela Mitchell (@cmitche21) November 15, 2014

Stars:2.5

This assignment was perfect! Someone special to me is my niece, Colbie Joy. She just entered our lives in August, but has already made such an impact in this world. Since she lives so close to UMW, I get to see her often, which can only mean a million pictures will be taken of her! I created this video montage from the day she was born up until today.

Process:

First thing was to find the pictures to put into iMovie.. this took me sometime because I got so distracted looking through them all.

Once I narrowed it down, I placed them into iMovie and rearranged them to how I needed it. Once, that was all done I added a theme to the video. I found this website extremely helpful given I don’t know much about iMovie. I used the theme ‘scrapbook’, which was perfect for this type of video!

I then looked through the already preloaded sound effects and used the theme music ‘modern’. Once that was all set, I uploaded it to Vimeo.

Turns out the most popular video in youtube history is still entertaining to watch just for the weird visuals and funky dance moves.

Oh boy, I actually got to cuss in a school assignment! For the Swede a scene video assignment, me and fellow ds106’er John recreated the iconic scene from season 1, episode 4. Of course, we decided to add our own spin to it using the resources we had available, as we lacked the items necessary for a murder scene investigation.

Special thanks to John Robie for being our camera man. With his help, it was a simple matter of editing the shots together in windows movie maker, and changing the audio levels so we were loud enough to be heard.

Difficulty Rating: 4.5 stars

For the Swede assignment, Jessica Reingold and I decided to do The Wire  Season 3, Episode 11.

In a Google Doc, we planned out the scenes we wanted to cover, what props we’d need, a simplified script, and when & where we’d film it.

This past week, we met up to film all the scenes. Then we edited them together and uploaded them.

The only content we added that is not original are sped-up versions of the theme song and the end song.

I’m really proud of what we created and I really enjoyed the process and the product!

Product Evolution put me just short of 10 stars for week 10 but I think the time I spent to make it half decent warrants that extra 1/2 star. Research of cameras in the motion picture industry took just as long as producing it. Cameras have an extensive history in the movie industry; I could have made this a 20 minute video easily. I chose the most significant periods within its history and attempted to find pics that followed that time period. Once I imported these pics into Movie Maker I then thought of songs that made me think of movies crossing a span of decades. Final touches were added to the video for effect, the end result is featured below.

For my final video assignment for the week Stefanie and I did “Swede a Scene” (4.5 stars). We decided that it would be easier and more fun if we did it together. It would allow us more people to work with rather than having to do a scene where it was just one person or where we would have to take on the role of several different people (more than we had to in this one).

How we did it:

Stefanie and I brainstormed for a while on which scene we thought we should do. Stefanie had the idea to go with this one because it would be fun, and I agreed! We could make it really funny and fun and cheesy which is kind of what we tried to do. Originally one of us was going to be Omar but I managed to convince my wonderful boyfriend to take on that role instead, it took a little coaxing but I got him to agree. He also brought an awesome camera for us to use–you may not be able to tell because YouTube cut down the quality but it looked great while we were making it.

Our sets consisted of inside and outside of Stefanie’s house and outside of my house. I did much of the recording with Stefanie recording the scenes that I was in (and with my boyfriend’s help because neither Stefanie nor I had really used a camera like that to video tape with before). We had to re-do very few scenes but it still took us well over an hour to get everything recorded. I was surprised at how long it took. Stefanie and I both said we couldn’t imagine how long recording a whole episode or even a whole series would take. I know it gave me a whole new appreciation for the work that directors and actors do.

Once we had all of the scenes recorded, we went to the Convergence Center to use the Macs to do the video editing. This was upon Groom’s suggestion that I try that rather than Windows Live Movie Maker because I wasn’t happy with the amount of editing I was able to do on Movie Maker. I was extremely happy with what we were able to do using iMovie. It took a little while for us to figure out the processes (and we still haven’t quite figured it all out) but we definitely had fun figuring it out. We had to import all of the videos (which I took from the memory card and put on my thumb drive so we could have access to them in the ITCC) into iMovie. Then we had to add the scenes that we needed into the project. We moved them around and had to cut out the yelling of “GO” at the beginning of each one (haha). My favorite edit that we made was at the end where Omar (Ryan) walks into Stefanie’s house and closes the door and then we cut to the inside with him closing the door. I was super proud of that edit haha.

When we finished editing the timing of the different scenes we moved onto the sounds. It was really windy on the day that we recorded so we had to be careful what we did with the sound. We found that you could insert sound effects using iMovie that were already on the computer. So we did that for almost all of the scenes. Even the outdoor ones. Sometimes we had to cut out the sounds that were there naturally because the wind was too loud or whatever. Sometimes we even had to amplify what we were saying so you could actually hear it (and some of Ryan’s scenes you still can’t hear because he talks super low and quietly). We amplified some scenes as much as we could and it is still hard to hear but we didn’t know what else we could do. We added background music to the scene were Omar is in the store getting the cereal. We took the liberty of changing it from asking if they had Honey Nut Cheerios to asking if they had Fruity Pebbles. We thought it would be funnier. We didn’t really change any other lines. But there also weren’t really any lines in this scene. We did change the drugs from pill form to powder form (kosher salt) because none of us had a whole bunch of pills lying around (thankfully). After we were done adding the background sounds, we added a title and a credits page, as well as the bloopers at the end. Then voila, we were done.

We uploaded it to YouTube and you can find the video here:

I did the Movie TV Scenes That Changed Our Lives assignment worth 5 stars. For this assignment I picked out 3 scenes that were very memorable to me, and provided some commentary on what the situation of the scene is and why it moved me.
These are three scenes from various tv shows that have really stuck with me overtime:

1. The end of “Symphony of Illusion” from How I Met Your Mother (7×12)

2. Vincent in the Museum from”Vincent and the Doctor” from Doctor Who (5×10)

3. The Lion Turtle from “Sozin’s Comet Part 2: Old Masters” from Avatar: The Last Airbender (3×19)

To make this video, I downloaded the episodes that I was picking these scenes from. I imported them into iMovie and cut them down to the led up of the scenes and then to just the particular scenes. I then added in either a freeze frame, or silent video leading up to the scene in order to provide space for my commentary about the scenes. I used iMovie’s ability to record from the webcam to import my commentary. I also used one of the pre-made themes for the transitions. Lastly, I inserted some titles to display which episode and show the scenes are from.

Two of them are pretty emotional, but I think that’s why I can remember them so well. I know in the moment, when I first watched the first two episodes, I started tearing up during these scenes. I’m not entirely satisfied with my explanation/analysis of the scenes, but I also didn’t want the commentary to sound scripted, so I just did a couple takes of my thoughts and picked the best one for each scene.

Tv scenes that have changed my life-VideoAssignments442 from Jessica Reingold on Vimeo.