So far I’ve completed 7 stars of Video Assignments. My next assignment is a BIG one, with 5 stars. I was a little nervous taking on a 5 star assignment, and while it was time consuming it wasn’t to terribly challenging.

My 5 star assignment was a “Return to the Silent Era“. For this assignment, you take a modern day movie trailer and turn it into black and white, remove the audio and replace it with a new sound track.

I chose The Hunger Games movie trailer for this assignment. It is a fairly new movie and I thought it would be a fun movie to recreate as a silent film. So, first I used KeepVid to download it as an MP4 to my computer. KeepVid is my go to for Youtube downloads, I find it the easiest and fastest program to use. From there I uploaded it into iMovie I cropped out parts that were not actual film (ie: release date info, etc).

When I decided to do this project, I looked at examples (which I usually do before fully committing) and the first example took me to Kelsie’s blog and her assignment was AMAZING! That girl is talented! But I read that she got her cue cards from google, so I headed over there myself and found a great choice for my video.

I plugged those into iMovie and added my script. I then went into each clip and transformed it into Black and White and cut the sound. All I had to do was put into the music. I went over to Freesound.org and just typed in Silent movie music. I chose this sound for the majority of the trailer. Then I typed in dramatic sounds and chose this sound because I felt it was perfect for two different parts of the trailer. After those downloaded, it was just a matter of putting them into iMovie and getting the sounds to match up with one another. There are two spots that do not have music, maybe for a couple of seconds. This wasn’t intentional at first, one sound ends and the second is very quiet in the beginning so there is just no sound.

Here is a screen shot of my work in iMovie. I couldn’t get the screen shot in one pictures so sorry for it being split up.

Once I had everything how I wanted it, I just uploaded it to Youtube and you can watch it below. I think it turned out really well and the music fit perfectly! Hope you enjoy.

Do you think you could watch a silent movie? I’m not sure I could, I like to hear the dialogue between characters.

12/16 stars

Ok, so I thought the first 2 video assignments I did were pretty fun..But this one was absolutely hilarious and I loved filming it.  The assignment, Public Service Announcement, called to make a PSA on a something we really wanted to make people aware of, or just a goofy, silly topic.  Of course, I chose the goofy topic.

Since my roommates have cats, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea of catnip abuse.  I started by writing out everything I was going to say, and then I filmed the cats doing those things.  Using Audacity, I recorded myself and uploaded Sarah McLachlan‘s song “Angel” to play in the background.  That song is so overused in commercials, so I thought it would be funny to put it with something that’s not serious.  I used Windows Movie Maker to organize the clips of the cats and then uploaded the audio from Audacity to play in the video.  Finally, I uploaded the end video to YouTube! Enjoy!

11/16 stars.

As soon as I read this title, I knew I wanted to do this assignment.  Inanimate Motion calls to create a movie story of an inanimate object.  Being at college, I didn’t have too many toys to choose from, BUT, I do love tigers so I have a small toy tiger and my tiger Pillow Pet.  I also a small wooden frog as their “friend.”

I really didn’t know what the plot of my story was going to be, so I just started taking photos of the small tiger walking across the table.  I decided that the frog would be a “friend” the tiger comes across and pounces on, but then “big brother” comes over and shoos the little tiger away and helps protect the frog.

I chose a song from The Lion King called Hakuna Matata, because in the movie (even though its lions not tigers!), the song represents a fun and playful time.

6/16 stars

I thought this assignment would be a lot harder, but I actually found it to be pretty easy and a lot of fun! I definitely recommend it to anyone who has 15 minutes free time to just goof around!

I had a lot of fun with this assignment.  We had to make a short 5 second video that told a story.  I decided to make a little gag joke out of my 5 second video.

It took a long time to figure something kind of clever out.  I took my inspiration when I was watching The Chronicles of Narnia and they entered Narnia through the closet.  I thought it would be funny to do the same thing including the meeting of Mr Tumnas.  Which was most of the joke.

My shooting was just a video of me in the beginning asking if you heard that.  It sets up the rest of the video and since I don’t have much time with 5 seconds I had to jam in as much as I could quickly.  Then I immediately jumped into a shot of moving into the closet, seeming like it’s from my eyes.  Then, I took my moving closet outside and put the same two shirts on the rack to match the shot as much as I could.  And then I peeped out of the walkable closet to see one of my roommates standing there.  Here’s a picture of the shooting.

I put everything together in iMovie, which again was very simple.  The only editing I needed to do was cut off the unnecessary fat from the clips and adding the opening cut and credits at the end.  Here’s my workspace:

And here’s my final movie:

One thing I wish I could have changed was matching the screenshot of walking into the closet more.  I think putting an arm in or something could have done that, but I separated my shoulder last night so I don’t have use of my left arm right now.

This assignment, called Where Are They Now??, called to create a video of movie character’s updated lives.  I chose Harry Potter, because there were so many character’s to update and it was a favourite movie of mine when I was a kid.  I grew up with these character’s , so it was funny to see where they’ve ended up presently.

I chose to do six characters: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Draco, Neville, and Ginny. I used bing to find images of them now and thought of a made-up update for them.  I used Powerpoint to create the title slide, which I screen captured and opened in Windows Movie Maker.  I then opened each of those images and added the text.  Finally, I used Audacity to trim the Harry Potter theme song and fade it in and out.  I put it all together in Movie Maker and published it on YouTube.

3/16 Stars

For my last video assignment, I wanted to really challenge myself. I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era {*****} assignment.

Since we first heard about our final projects, I wanted to make my last video assignment so it could tie into my final project character. There was only one problem, I didn’t want to base my final project character off of one assignment. I wanted to base my assignments off my final project character.

I chose to do my silent movie trailer on the movie Now You See Me (2013). The reason I chose this movie trailer is because I am dying to go see this movie because of the trailer. Movie trailers are created so people will want to go see that movie. If a trailer is dull, it might deter people away from going to see it.

I converted the trailer from YouTube into an MP4 file via KeepVid. I searched for music that I wanted to include in it on Freesound.org. I downloaded this silent movie music clip and decided to repeat it over and over until I would play this haunting clip. I planned to play the haunting clip when the tension is rising in the trailer.

Here is a screen shot of my work of art:

I liked the idea of the cue cards when putting in some words to keep the viewer on the same page as the storyline. If there weren’t any cue cards, I think everyone’s creative minds would be going at the speed of sound!! I also thought the cue cards played an interesting role. Obviously in movie trailers, there is a lot of dialouge going on. Having cue cards for this assignment made me pick out what words were important enough to have their own cue card. I got my cue card image from Google and used the ‘Stencil’ font to make it look old.

Here is my silent movie trailer:

Blog post title: Magic – B.o.B (ft. Rivers Cuomo)

So for this assignment, we had to show how changing a simple cut of a video could change the view of a character’s values, beliefs, etc.  The idea came from this Albert Hitchcock video where he changed the middle clip in between two others of a face and another face and some stuff happened…  This explains it better:

Anyway, I planned this one out last week and ended up bending the rules a bit for mine.  I did three different shots because they all demonstrated what I wanted to do and all had different effects.  I don’t think that any are better than the others, so that was part of the reasoning.  I think it ended up looking pretty good.  I ended up using the disgust face because it was different.  Here’s the final cut.

The first shot was a picture of my girlfriend making  a normal facial expression.  The third was a shot of her making a disgusted face.  I used these in all three clips.

The first clip has her making a face of disgust after looking at a bag of peas.  This gives the sense that she either does not like peas or does not like vegetables.  We would have to wait more shots to determine what was really true.  Or maybe both are true.  Who knows.

The second clip is where I cheated a little bit.  I used 2 clips in between the faces because it was hard to determine what was actually going on in the shot without the tin of Skoal being shown in a closeup.  But anyway, the whole shot gives the idea that chewing tobacco is disgusting, or maybe she was just disgusted at the person, the handlebar mustache–probably all of it.

The third shot is the ambiguous one, which makes it a lot of fun.  Here, we have a foreigner–my roommate–walking into the house as she looks on.  Is she a racist here?  Did he just fart as he walked by?  This one has a lot of interpretations that could be held, which is the fun of this shot.  Obviously I would have to get a lot more done or include some dialogue to reveal the true motivations.  Film is fun.

My only critique of this is that there is not any continuity of the shot.  It is just her in front of a door, and then I filmed everything else outside–but hey, it’s a nice day out.  Wouldn’t want to waste it inside doing this, would I?  I also made a mistake in the first clipping of this film, but it’s fixed