The lip synch! woot!

This was the most fun to do. I initially wanted to do it to Carole King’s Way Over Yonder. However, that was WAY too depressing for ds106 (and I already associate that song with funerals..bad). Instead, I dug into what songs are really fun to sing. BETSY Q!!!! Yes, that crazy lady that visited my elementary school every year with the piano and the crazy songs and the berets and yeah, you get the point. And classically, the one I most remember is the I Say No Rap about anti-drugs.

I love to rap. A lot. So I turned on my webcam. I opened iTunes and downloaded the rap. I played it from my library after turning the webcam on. Once I was done lip synching, I just saved the video. It automatically went onto my videos on my hard-drive.  I put it on youtube. This is YouTube gold. Although not Nicole337 material, because I realized that she ACTUALLY sings her songs herself.

PROBLEMS: My daggone body movements were a lot harder to do. I was not sure if I should include hand motions or not, so I stayed pretty simple. I also had a hard time remembering the number of ‘nos’ in the rap. But I LOVE BETSY Q and have since I was five years old. This rap is gold. I love it. I have probably sung that song over 1000 times because it is so fun!

I hope you guys like it. Here it is:

Also, it is VERY embarrassing. Like I felt like I was getting in touch with my middle school self and crossing that off the bucket list.

Video Assignment Count: 12

After finishing an assignment were I redubed all of the audio I decided to d the next logical step and complete Joining the Conversation where I only had to dub half the conversation.

Here’s the result:

Now you’re probably asking yourself, “why Isaac. why choose this movie to use in your assignment?” Well friends it should be obvious: Batman is awesome. Also in the world of the internet this scene is parodied quite often and with good results. However as that video shows, almost everyone always messes with what Batman says, because let’s face it he’s kind of goofy in this scene. So as I watched it again, I thought two things 1) dude just dropped his falafel, that sucks 2) what if he was completely not scared the whole time?

Oh by the way for those you who who’ve been living under a rock here’s the orginial:

So. There wasn’t a lot of previous work to work off of. Only one other person has completed the assignment and their link doesn’t work. Other than the Godfather/fluffy cat example and the link in the other paragraph most of the inspiration came right form the ol’ noggin.

Making it was pretty simple, and almost identical to my There Will Be Blood redub. Here what I did was (once in Final Cut Pro) detach the audio. Then play the clip like normal, then when it was the upside down man’s turn to speak I would cut out all of his audio and record a voice over in that time slot. It took me a couple times to get the timing correct but I was able to bang it our pretty quickly. The recording process as wasn’t as hard as last time, because I already had a planned script in my brain.

That’s pretty much it. Just youtube, Final Cut, Batman, and the tasty tasty power of falafel.

For one of my video assignments, I chose to do the “Movie Scenes that Changed our Lives” assignment that was worth 5 stars.  I ended up choosing 3 movies that had a profound impact on me and 1 that just terrified the crap out of me.

I can’t remember when I first saw “The Sandlot”, but I fell in love with it instantly.  I quote either the “You play ball like a girl!” line or the “You’re killing me, Smalls” line frequently.  It’s a great coming of age story about friendship and baseball.  I’m not the biggest baseball fan, but the lessons it taught me about sticking by your friends have really stuck with me.

And then I had another sports movie.  ”D2: The Mighty Ducks.”  It features one of my favorite speeches, which I showcased in the video.  I mention that I don’t really care for the movie because it kind of makes a mockery of the sport I love, but whatever.  The point is that Gordon Bombay’s speech has stuck with me throughout life.  Also, I like quacking.

Next up we have the scariest movie I ever watched as a kid: “The Ring.”  That girl crawling out of the tv makes me incredibly uneasy to this day.  Something about the way she distorted the faces of people she killed just…. ick.  Freaks me out, man.  But since watching this movie I’ve learned to enjoy horror movies more.

Finally, my favorite movie, “The Big Lebowski.”  I think I explain it really well in the video, so get your explanation from there.  Sorry for the crap quality.

I ran everything through windows movie maker and then threw in transitions for good measure.

11/16 Stars down.

Watching film with the stereo on

For this assignment I chose Ke$ha’s “Die Young” to go over top the cornucopia blood bath scene of the Hunger Games. I like the juxtaposition of the up beat music with the brutal and bloody scene of the movie. Also, I was able to match up the lyrics really well with the events in the clip. I used YTD Video Downloader to download the clips and convert the Hunger Games clip to an MP4 file so that I could edit it in streamclip. I then used YTD it convert them to Windows Media Files so that I could work with it in Windows Movie Maker. For the Ke$ha video I used YTD to convert it in to an MP3 and edit it in audicty. In Movie Maker I imported my edited clips and worked them until I was happy with the timing.

3 stars

For this assignment, I chose to do the silent movie.

First, I had to choose a movie. I chose the trailer of Elf because I start watching Christmas movies right after Halloween (or during…). I picked the trailer because it gave such a good overview.  I downloaded it from youtube using iLivid, you just paste the URL in there and it will automatically download the video for you. Once the video was downloaded, I put it into Adobe Premiere. Here’s where it began to take about 6 hours to finish.

I had never really worked with Premiere and there is a HUGE learning curve. Finding out how to mute the track volume was not difficult at all, mainly because when you look to the bottom right of the program, it lists Video 1 and Audio 1. I simply muted the audio. The big problem came with those dang cue cards. I used ones that nearly everyone else I looked at had used. The hard part was figuring out what text to put on them. Once I decided, I tried to import them into Premiere. BIG TROUBLE! I could not for the life of me get these puppies to work right.

I took a deep breath and finally got them spliced in where I needed them, although it chopped up the video and at one point I had two of the same exact thing playing…anyway! (Also, please excuse the third one because it lasts wayyyyy too long but I did not know how to cut it down without messing up the entire video. I tried using the razor tool but it wouldn’t let me slide the rest of the video down to fill in the gaps…so it just leaves more time for the audience to read.) I went to the dropdown menu of video effects and added black adn white and noise by simply pulling those options directly on to the timeline thing of the video and audio. Once I got that mess straightened out, I pulled in the music from the soundtrack. I chose the nutcracker suite because it’s instrumental and it actually ended up going really well with the clip I selected (plus, it came from the soundtrack.)

After what felt like an eternity razoring the video and trying to get everything perfect, I decided to export the media as an mp4. I chose maximum render quality and it exported within a few minutes to my desktop. From there, I put it on youtube and then blogged about it here. Hooray!