For my second assignment I did the musicless music video assignment. I don’t watch music videos often, so I told my friend he could choose for me. This is the result of a very dramatic music video by Lindsay Lohan and my cruel humor combined. I tried to make it interesting and had a little too much fun with some animal noises. I tried to make the video lighter for all of its drama and difficult topic. I hope it is sort of funny and enjoyable!

To make this I struggled a bit. I downloaded the video from YouTube easily by using the ‘pwn’ web address to download the video from a site. Then I struggled with finding how to edit it. The mp4 would not go into iMovie, so I uploaded it to Mpeg Streamclip and changed the video to a quicktime video. Then I could upload it to iMovie, turned the sound on 0 and then dropped in some sound effects. I tried to do overall interesting sounds, meshed with some sounds that lined up with things actually happening in the video. It was a struggle at first but now I know how to do this and feel pretty cool. I’m sure this skill will be useful in the weeks to come!

3.5*

This is my healthy vine challenge where I took two second videos of chicken, salad and guacamole. I chose this assignment because I had already planned a nice dinner because my mother and sister were visiting me at school. I was excited to make dinner for them and had to make it healthy for fear of being yelled at by my mother. It turned out really nicely actually. I made chicken with many spices and put salsa and balsamic vinegar on top. I have made chicken before, but just sort of threw some stuff on top to make it work with the guacamole. I love making guac and put salsa, salt, pepper and garlic mixed with avocado. I have this great Mexican guac making bowl that I got for Christmas. Then I tossed a quick salad with chickpeas and pine nuts on it. It all turned out really well and it was pretty nice to have my family there! I took the videos and uploaded them to Vine and then embedded them here.

2*

I decided to do the Chipmunk Style video assignment, which requires you to take a pre-existing video or scene from a TV show or movie and either speed it up or adjust the clip so that it sounds like a chipmunk.

I knew that in order for this to be effective and hopefully humorous, I should select something involving characters with a deep voice. I decided that I would do Samuel L. Jackson’s reading of Go the Fuck to Sleep.

Here is the original version:

I downloaded this video using KeepVid and imported it into iMovie. Then I just used the audio effects to raise the pitch. The chipmunk effect is typically obtained through speeding up speech, but that speech is typically spoken at a slower rate so that it can be understood when it is sped up. I decided to adjust the pitch instead as that doesn’t affect the speed.

Here is one of the voice actors from the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks series showing how he has to say the lines so they can be edited and still coherent.

After doing the minimal audio editing, I exported it as a file and uploaded it to YouTube.

I think it’s really interesting to hear how much more humorous this sounds when there isn’t a deep voice reading it.

To make this video for the Return to the Silent Era assignment worth 5 stars I first found my trailer and downloaded it using the Firefox add-on Video DownloadHelper.

I imported the trailer of Moonrise Kingdom into a video editing software called Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is very similar to iMovie but it allows you to do much more with your video. I had never used Final Cut Pro before making this video, and so I click around and Google tips quite a bit, but overall it was a pretty straightforward piece of software to use.

In order to the make the video become silent, I separated the audio and video by right clicking on the trailer clip and selecting the “Expand Audio/Video.” Then I deleted the trailer audio and imported the music file from the Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack to serve as the music for the silent trailer. Next, I added in the title cards with some of the key lines of dialogue from the trailer and put them in the appropriate places within the trailer. I used the Blade tool to split the video file to make a spot for where the title cards could go. Then to make the trailer look old, I added some effects to the entire trailer. I added the Black and White and Aged Film effects, as well as the Crisp Contrast Effect to the video parts. Lastly, I realized that my music track was longer than the video, and that end of the song would  fit nicely with the end of the video, so I trimmed down the beginning of the music and slid the entire file backwards to the beginning of the trailer.

I’ve decided to make a short mock trailer inspired by this video assignment to depict the death of Wallace, a tragic moment from season 1. I also decided to include the effects on D’Angelo and the immediate aftermath. They were both very similar, as they both had a sense of innocence and moral good that is rare in the criminal world. And as can be shown, this mindset doesn’t last long in that environment.

The song used is “Before” by the amazing Jeremy Zuckerman.

The Wire: Wallace from Ien Harris on Vimeo.