How much of a story can I tell in a 1 second video? … Challenge Accepted. I chose to do video assignment by noiseprofessor… My objective of this video is to show me.. in a nutshell basically. I chose to take all stills (pics) and run them into a 1 second video using Windows Live Movie Maker. This task was not hard because all I had to do was place a time for each photo to show. I really hope you enjoy this because I liked making it(:
For this Video Assignment by Alan Levine, I needed to create a video that showed entire day…
This assignment was a lot of fun to do. I enjoyed carrying around my camera and recording bits and pieces of my day.
I used Windows Live Movie Maker to make this assignment possible. I imported all the clips from my camera and trimmed them to make the flow. I used many slide transitions and captions to create a movie like effect. I also put in a background music song that represents me in a nutshell and my commuting life. I really enjoyed this aspect of having to show my daily routine day(:
For this Movie Scenes that Changed Our Lives- Video Assignment by Annie Belle, I selected scenes from 3 movies… October Baby, Sweet Home Alabama, and A Walk to Remember. These scenes that I chose changed my outlook on life.
MovieSceneMontage – Click once for another page then click again for the video in your choice of player(: until you can open the file(: (Explanation for not embedding at bottom)
The first scene is from October Baby. In this scene the main character is talking with a Catholic priest about her twin brother, whom she didn’t know she had. She speaks about his loss and her possibly failing at her life. She feels she doesn’t belong. I chose to blog about this scene because I feel as though I can’t completely relate to what she is going through… but I know I have felt many times during my life that I wasn’t living to my full potential. In that, I need to live every day like it’s my last. Because of this scene I am truly more grateful for every breath I take.
Oh my gosh… my heart melts every time I watch the second movie scene. This scene is from the movie, Sweet Home Alabama, which is one of my all time favorite movies. In the end this opening scene, the main character’s younger self asks the childhood boy friend why he would want to marry her… to kiss her any time he wants. This scene is just too darn cute and anyone with a heart would recognize how silly the scene is but also appreciate the intention of the younger boy in making his point. I just love this scene and had to include it in my movie video montage(:
In the next quick scene from October Baby, there is a line that stood out to me so much that it is now my go-to saying… “Hate the crime, not the criminal” Those are not just empty words… I was blown away at this point in the movie, the girl’s birth mother wanted her dead and this police officer was giving her the best advice one could ever give. I live by this saying now. There are so many moments in life when it’s just easier to hate the criminal but there is a higher power within us to overlook the criminal and just hate the crime done.
In this next scene also from the movie, October Baby, comes a powerful scene about forgiveness. We all need forgiveness every day of our lives. I completely lost it when I was watching this scene. The sincerity of the preacher’s voice and message was just so powerful and I feel as though this scene spoke directly towards me.
The dock scene is from the movie, A Walk to Remember. In this movie the main character is dying of cancer. She has a heart of gold. Her faith brings her to say whatever she feels and knows. She wants the co-main character to believe in everything so bad. This scene just represents the truths to be told. I live by my faith and help to guide my friends and family to do the same.
In the ending scene of October Baby, I was crying. The emotional impact it had on me was severe. I felt every emotion the characters played out. The main character finally was able to thank her dad for wanting her… wanting her.. can you imagine? What a great love. This movie is a definite must see for all those ready, able, and willingly to step up in their lives.
To wrap up my video montage I chose to end on a humorous note with the first part of the opening scene of Sweet Home Alabama. In this scene the young boy asks the young girl to marry him. As any 10 year old girl would say in response, I’m 10 years old.. I’ve got too much to live for. I just love this scene because it always makes me laugh even when I am feeling under the weather.
This video assignment was a lot of fun to do. I first started by uploading all the scenes into Windows Live Movie Maker. I then trimmed the scenes into reasonable segments. Then I voiceover-ed some scenes with my version of commentary. I used many captions.
Well I hope you enjoyed My Movie Scenes Montage! I imported it to YouTube but it was taken down b/c of copyright.
BEWARE! IF YOU KEEP READING AND SEE THE VIDEO, PLEASE DON’T EVER MENTION IT TO ME BECAUSE IT’S BEYOND EMBARRASSING. PLEASE AND THANK YOU 
Okay, now that that’s out-of-the-way, we shall continue. So the assignment I chose to do was called 30 Second Documentary, and it’s basically for us to make a documentary of anything we see, are good at doing, bad at doing, or anything we wanted. The assignment was a “show don’t tell” but I totally told because the video is super embarrassing and I didn’t want people just watching and not knowing what happens. Okay, so it’s not that bad, but it’s embarrassing to me. It’s one of my secret talents haha. So I can make a fish face, and hold it for a super long time.
You may be wondering, how did I acquire such skill? Well it all started when I was 8. My uncle had a fish tank with tons of fish, and I thought they were so cute. So I went on a quest to figure out how to make the face (because I thought it would make me look cute too?)… I spent long days, and long nights practicing. Until one day, I was able to make it and hold it. So it’s not the best looking face in the world.. butttttt maybe one day you’ll find someone who loves making fishy faces with you and all your hard work will be appreciate it by someone who does weird things too!
It took about an hour browsing YouTube before I found the perfect scene to re-make into a silent movie a la the Return to the Silent Era assignment, and I was kind of surprised that it turned out to be from the TV show Supernatural. Here’s the original clip:
And my silent movie re-make:
This thing… definitely worth the five star rating. Hell, I’d give it an extra star just for how detail-oriented the whole assignment is, and how frustrating it was to get all the programs I needed to cooperate.
To begin at the beginning, though: Supernatural. A show about brothers fighting mythical creatures and ghosts, and then demons, and then angels, and then trying to stop the apocalypse, and then… yeah. It gets intense pretty quickly. That said, despite how modern the context, Supernatural is at its core an action series, which made it the perfect choice for a silent film adaptation. I’ll admit that I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to silent films, but one thing I have noticed about them is that due to the lack of voices, there’s always a lot of action going on in every scene. Whether it’s the classic girl-tied-to-the-railroad gambit or super dramatic expressions, the audience needed something to look at to keep them engaged. Supernatural has all of that in spades, and the pauses for dialogue between actions in this scene made it easy to place each title card to give a sense of back-and-forth banter between hero and villain.
I used YTD Video Downloader to download the clip to my hard drive, then uploaded it into Windows Movie Maker and quickly realized that the “Old Film” effects I’d been relying on to complete this project had been gutted in the so-called “updates” to the program. After poking around online a little and asking a few ds106 students for advice, I downloaded VideoPad and gave that a whirl. No dice—not only was the program abysmally slow on my computer (a complaint many others have about this otherwise well-stocked piece of freeware), the interface was too complex to master in a week and the “old film” effect it produced was migraine-inducing, as evidenced by this ds106-ers otherwise excellent video.
After a bit of poking around, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person lamenting the loss of the video effects from previous versions of Movie Maker, and it was still possible to download Version 2.6 from Microsoft’s website. This was a Godsend, but I found that it was easier for me to edit my clip and insert title cards with the version of Movie Maker I already had because I was more familiar with the program. I decided to edit my clip with the later version and add effects later with the previous one.
Creating the title cards was one of the more time-consuming parts of this assignment. I did a quick image search for silent movie title cards and found this wonderfully simple example from a teacher’s blog in Hollywood (how cool is THAT, by the way?). After importing the image into Photoshop (YES, PHOTOSHOP. THAT IS A THING I HAVE NOW!!) I found an appropriately silent-film-y font and went through the clip writing out the dialogue and sound effects. I added some intro title cards to give context to the clip as a whole, and some hand-drawn flourishes on the “Supernatural” and “The End” title cards completed the effect. Once that was done, I imported them all into Movie Maker and stuck them in the right places.
After fighting with the formatting a bit and going through a couple of conversions (thank you once again, Online-Convert.com) so that I could upload the edited clip into my older version of Movie Maker, I managed to get all of my video suitably old-ed up. I was pretty disappointed that the only way to get that authentic, jumpy silent film feel meant a serious decline in overall image quality, but decided it was an acceptable sacrifice since I was trying to evoke a specific style of film, and conveying the scene itself was secondary.
Last but not least, music. I found the perfect track on Incompetech.com, a ditty called “Amazing Plan – Distressed,” and uploaded it into Audacity to edit it. The biggest change I made to the song was extending (rather clumsily, I’ll admit) the major-key middle section. Once that was done I added it to the final movie, exported it as a video file and sent it off to YouTube. SO EASY, RIGHT?!?!
As to the work of other students who’ve attempted this assignment, I mentioned Norihide’s Jurassic Park silent film. I think he did a fantastic job capturing the feel of a silent film—in fact, I’d say his movie is far superior to mine simply because of how much clearer it is, annoying jumpiness notwithstanding. I also love how he was able to capture the cinematic feel of Jurassic Park without cluttering it up with too many title cards. I think I would have been tempted to do a lot more with sound effects than he did.
A current student, Witt LeFew, did this assignment with the trailer for Skyfall, the most recent Bond film. While I really liked the way his video kept the clarity of the original trailer while also looking like an authentic silent-era movie and his use of big-band music to create atmosphere, I thought incorporating title cards would have made it even better. Trailers for silent films always had really fun title cards with big, splashy adjectives on them, and that would’ve made his trailer that much more exciting.
I chose to do this assignment because I was talking about the movie Cool Hand Luke with a friend and it was the first movie that came to mind. And then I was trying to think of a song that had to do with eating a lot and I was reminded of my days of Weird Al Yankovic. Thus, the reason for my choices. To create this, I ripped the video from youtube using the keepvid.com, and then edited it using iMovie, which was a lot more simple than I thought. I removed the sound from the video, and added in my own music–also ripped from youtube. Then, I uploaded it to youtube using iMovie, and voila! Here is the result.
Vintage Education Videos is one of the assignments I chose to do. This assignment consisted of creating an educational, or how to video the way they did it in the 50′s. I decided to do a video on how to make tea! I did this because I love drinking eat. Preferably chamomile or green tea. I find it really relaxing and love the warmth it brings, specially on cold fall days. By the time I made this video I was basically a pro at iMovies.
I decided to film myself making tea. I recorded the video on my iPhone. Although it doesn’t have the best quality, it didn’t really matter since videos from the 50′s were kind of terrible. The bad thing about it was that there was no way to pause the video on my phone while it was recording, so I ended up recording a 5 minute long video on how to make tea. The video was so long because I was still recording while the water was heating up in the microwave and that took forever!! After recording such thing, it was a hassle emailing it to myself to download it on my computer, so I had to go a different route. I actually ended up importing my video to my iPhoto (which I had never done) and getting it on my computer that way. I thought the hard part was over after that, but i was mistaking! The video was so long that not only did it take forever for iMovie to create thumbnails for it, but there was extensive editing to get done.
Educational videos from the 50′s are usually quick and to the point, so I ended up deleting about 4 minutes from the original video. Every time I would cut out scenes it made small individual clips within iMovie, so I had ended up with about 16 individual clips. For each one I had to go in and manually turn off the original volume, and change the setting to black and white. This was a long process, but adding the music was much quicker since I could do it to the whole thing rather than the individual parts. After the video was done, I was not happy with it. I felt like it was missing something. I tried changing the scene from black and white to the “aged film” effect, but it had color to it and it didn’t look right. I tried using both the black and white, and the aged film to make it better but was only able to use one at a time.
Since it was impossible to use two effects at the same time, I decided to leave the movie as black and white with the song Merry Go playing on the background. I exported the file into my desktop and imported it again into iMovie. Doing this created one clip instead of the 16 original ones I already had. This allowed me to change the effect on the film (with black and white effect) to aged, which resulted in me having the best of both worlds! :)
Worth 5 stars
This might be my new favorite assignment this year. It was certainly challenging, and time consuming, but it was a blast to do. I thought the idea of “Drive” was a good choice because the main character “Driver” hardly speaks at all in the movie. In fact, he has maybe 10 more lines in the entire movie that aren’t said in the trailer. I didn’t want to simply use the same words from the trailer, so I used most of the same ones, with a little comedy added in. The movie itself is pretty serious, and in my opinion there are a few unnecessary gory scenes such as a girl getting shot in the face with a shotgun, but overall I really do like the movie and I think its a good watch. The biggest issue I had with this assignment was the the timing of the scenes. It runs a little faster than I wanted because I couldn’t get them exactly right, but I still think it turned out pretty well.
Last one: Tutorial for the Mother.
Ok, in the video, I call her mom, but everyone calls her Pegs. She already knew how to make a Pandora station, which is what I was going do the tutorial on.
I recorded this using screenr because I couldn’t get jing to upload to youtube. Screenr gives the option to immediately upload to youtube, and it links with your account to make it super easy. Also, to set up an account, I just plugged in my google account info and chose a username.
I tried my best to talk through the entire thing although apparently, I am NOT good at multitasking. As in talking while typing. Oops. But Pegs will understand. I really thought this was a good assignment because it seems Pegs is always asking me how to do something. Also, with screenr, you can size the record screen to your desired size/screenshot. I like this because you can’t really do that as easily with jing.
For my final assignment this week, I have chosen to recreate my favorite scene from Fight Club for the “Swede a Scene” assignment.
Oh wow. Wow. Haha. Wow. Now you all know why I’m not a theatre major. I can’t deliver lines AT ALL. Pretty decent at hitting myself, though. I’m glad that swedes are supposed to be bad. It took forever to try and decide on a scene to do. Yesterday I was planning on doing the exorcist bed scene where I would be in bed playing the part of the possessed girl. The day before that, I had wanted to do a scene from Rocky (just for the song). It was probably going to be a montage scene. Oh well.
This was a complicated one to shoot. I wanted to mimic the actual scene’s camera angles, but because I wasn’t the one filming, it was much more difficult. My friend Rob was the one doing the camera work, and he actually did a really good job. We read the script for the scene on the computers that we have open. There’s actually a part that didn’t show up well on the video, but I used a bit of ketchup on my fist during the punching to try and make a bloody nose, but it just didn’t work out well.
I can’t find the scene on youtube, but it’s part of this scene.
I ran all of my clips (of which there were many, short camera angle changes and the like) through Windows Movie Maker and then threw all the pieces together. I also recorded two sound bits using the Easy Voice Recorder app on my phone. Those were easy to splice into the program too.
16/16 Stars down.
