Write up a blog post embedding your new version of the story. Explain where the idea came from, and include reference URLs for all media you used. Also include a screen shot of your video editing interface.

I knew this assignment would be challenging and it lived up to it. Talk about using all we have learned in one homework assignment! I was able to download the files just fine using http://en.savefrom.net/ and also soundcloud to get all the files. I used moviemaker on my laptop to edit the movie and audacity to do the sound track because it was easier to work with the files. I also found my singing lion on YouTube
My story for this Charlie Chaplin reimagined is he is an ‘animal whisper’ that can talk to animals via his mind. He has found himself in a circus full of crazy animals that are either super excited to talk to him (horse and dog) or mostly bored with him (lion). The woman in the story does not get that he can talk to animals telepathically and is confused. However, in the end the lion gets tired of him interrupting his sleep, is a little playful and sings that he is sleeping, and then yells at him to leave him alone. This scares Charlie and he runs out and up a pole. But everything is fine and he comes down.

I hope you like it! Here it is:

I couldn’t have done all this without my source files used. Here you go!

Sound files

Original video clips

Screen showing my movie editing:

Video Editing screen shot

Overall it was a good experience and great use of Movie Maker. However, I think it would have been easier with a better movie editing software like Apple has but I can only do what I have free on laptop. The sound piece was hardest and the titles.
Not bad for my first time if I say so myself!

Create a video taking us on a tour of somewhere you love or hate, providing commentary that points out the unusual in a tone distinct from most “tourist” videos.

I made a slight modification to the guidelines for the Sardonic Tours video assignment. Instead of narrating the video I made, I inserted captions instead. I must admit that the execution of this assignment was different from how I imagined it to be when I was planning it.  The video clip as well as the still photos included were taken during my 2012 birthday trip to Turkey, during which I visited the Hagia Sophia twice.  I could not tire of taking photographs inside . The 00:38 video clip was my starting point for this assignment and I supplemented it with some of my favorite photos.

Originally, I had thought to do an annoying voiceover of an interior decorator casting a critical eye inside the Hagia Sophia. However, I was in a time crunch and adding captions to the Windows Live Movie Maker project seemed faster. I found instrumental Turkish classical music by conducting a Google search for “Turkish classical music instrumental free download.” I downloaded an MP3 audio file from Stafa Band.  The music video is below:

Completing this assignment has made me realize that I need to review and edit those countless video clips I take during trips. If only I had the time to do it…

For the Why So Serious assignment I decided to mash up two of my favorite Rachael McAdams movies, The Notebook and Mean Girls. I thought this juxtaposition would be interesting because Rachael plays such different characters in these two movies. Her mothers are also very different as one tries to be like her daughter, while the other tries to tell her daughter what to do. Can you tell which is which?

The toughest part of this assignment was finding two scenes that would work together. Once I did some research on Youtube and found the two I liked, I downloaded the videos using savefrom.net and a Google extension called Backtick that allows downloading into MP3s. I edited in Movie Maker by trimming the audio and video clips to points where they would match (Getting Regina’s like to match Ali’s head turn was a personal win!) and saved the video to an MP4.

Here is a screenshot of the edit.

I repurposed this 02:55 clip from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film “The Circus” to create an anachronistic story about a mime who missed the ultimate Darwin Awards top prize. The criterion for the Darwin Awards follows:

“In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.”

Darwin Awards Honorable Mentions recognize individuals who survive their misadventures with their reproductive capacity intact.

Photo credit: http://www.darwinawards.com

I used the recommended site to download Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus from YouTube.

One of the challenges of this assignment was finding the appropriate foley for each segment of the clip. My method was to turn down the volume on the Chaplin video clip and then listen on SoundCloud to each of the submitted assignments to see if it married well with the segment.  To find the submitted assignments, I followed the tags listed on the Week 6 & 7 page. However, I found  that some of the SoundCloud submissions were not set to be downloaded. I found the fourth segment, 01:31 – 02:00 to be particularly challenging, as some of the submissions either did not have any sound or were not set to be downloaded.  I also discovered that while I had tagged my WordPress assignment submission, I didn’t apply the correct tag to the SoundCloud file, so that when it came to the fifth segment, I did not see my assignment listed. I immediately applied the correct tag (chaplin-lion-05), so it now shows and can be downloaded.

I saved each downloaded audio file with the segment in the file name (e.g., 0000-0030.mp3)

00:00-00:30 from klasalata

00:31 – 01:00 from mbutlerr

01:01 – 01:30 from dylangott1

01:31 – 02:00 from cbedross1

02:01 – 02:30 from cwyrough

02:31 – 02:55 from Kaitlyn Crotty

I used The Tokens’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as the main soundtrack, which I downloaded from MP3Skull.  Because the entire song was shorter than the video clip, I supplemented it with several  trumpet audio files that I downloaded from FreeSound.  This was a good review exercise for using Audacity and working with the timeline and layers. Below is my Audacity screenshot:

The foley does not match up perfectly with each segment, but given that this is the first time I’ve used this application, I am satisfied with the results.

After finalizing the Audacity project as an mp3 file, I added it to the Windows Live Movie Maker project. I then added captions in select areas of the video clip. Below is a screenshot of the Movie Maker project:

Windows Live Movie Maker screenshot

In keeping with the travel theme of this blog, here is a slideshow of my own Darwin Award-worthy lion encounter in southern Africa in 2011:Click to view slideshow.

For one of the video assignments, I thought it would be fun to complete Where are they now?

“Don’t you hate how some movies just leave you hanging!! Do you ever wonder what happens to the characters next? Well this is your chance to let the world know where they are today! Choose a movie and then create some type of video update on the characters current life. Use pictures, video clips, drawings; whatever you want and compile them into a video.”

I chose the end of the courtroom scene of A Few Good Men, although the video clip does not show all of the characters for whom I created a “where-are-they-now?” story.

I used Savefrom.net to download the A Few Good Men video clip from YouTube.  Then I searched for photos and videos using Google. I selected the actors that I knew had a diversity of work post-A Few Good Men. This made it easy to make up a “where-are-they-now?” story.  See matrix below:

Before I went on my first trip to Guantanamo Bay, I kept getting asked whether I had seen A Few Good Men. I had only seen it once before and the first scene that always came to mind is Jack Nicholson yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!” For this assignment, I wanted to pick a different clip, not that one. I’ve seen the movie a few more times and it is inextricably linked to my memories of Guantanamo Bay. Here are a few of my favorite photos:Click to view slideshow.

For this assignment, you are supposed to provide play by play commentary on a video. I thought to mix it up a bit and do something a little different, so I found a video on “how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” since it’s one of my favorite foods ;) and add a different spin on it..see my video below..

I first downloaded the video using “pwnyoutube” then uploaded it directly into Windows Movie Maker. Once I had the video, I recorded my commentary in SoundCloud and uploaded that clip into Movie Maker as well. Finally, I added in a soundtrack to the beginning and end. The song is “Manners” by Klaypex.

Here is the original video..

Here is a screen shot of my movie maker project..

This was my first video creation/editing experience! I learned a lot from this assignment and it was cool to see how easy it can be to add in things like a title and credits. The trickiest part for me was adding in the overlay audio, but I ended up using Audacity to create the “layered” audio that I needed.  The story that I used was that the man in the video was a new employee looking to join the Circus’ fraternity and part if joining it, he needed to prove his “worth” by entering the lions cage. There really wasn’t any main reason as to why I chose this storyline, it’s just something I thought of and went with it.  For the audio, I used Avicii’s Levels (video below)

Here is the final compilation after my video editing using the Windows Movie Maker software in conjunction with Audacity.

Then I grabbed the Foley sound recordings of current and past classmates to provide the sound effects..

As you can see in the below screen shot, the audio section is all one file that I imported from Audacity.