video – Assignment Bank

Lulu on the go!

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Play by Play was one of the assignments I chose to do this week. The purpose was to “take any real life video and give us a play by play commentary on what we see!”

Lulu is a bearded dragon and she loves crickets. She spends most of her time in her cage, but does enjoy the occasional walk under the sunshine. I actually think that Lulu is a male lizard, but by the time we found out, I had had her for a year, and we didn’t want her getting confused with the sudden name change.

I had a video of my lizard Lulu that I recorded over the summer. I took her out on a walk, with her leash of course. I decided to use this video for this assignment because I kinda just wanted to show her off . The video consists of me narrating what she was experiencing at the moment of her walk! I thought this would be a good assignment to do because it would be so cool if we could actually hear our animals think and know what is going through their head at when their roaming around outside.

I’m not an expert on iMovie, heck I didn’t even know how to do anything so it took me a while to get started. It took a lot of messing around with it to start being comfortable around it. Luckily, when I imported the movie onto there I saw that in the middle of my screen there was a microphone and BOOM! a light went off. My experiences with audacity really came in handy, and I remember that if I wanted to do a voice over I would probably have to lower the volume on the video, or mute it all together. Luckily it was fairly easy muting the sound from the video and recording my voice over it. The wonderful thing about it was that iMovie is that it allows you to play the video at the exact moment you start recording so it really allows you to be precise on the timing. One thing I couldn’t manage to fix was how slim the video was. I wish I could have figured out how to make it wider. I did some intense research and found that the reason it’s like that is because of the way I filmed the video on my iPhone. Regardless of that little mishap, I am pretty content with the overall product.

I hope you enjoyed my video.

Worth 2 stars.

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3 Stars: Cooking with Wine

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Video number 2 this week is my very own cooking show, performed for the assignment “Cooking show“! Featuring me having a mental breakdown! How fun! More exclamation points! But yeah, once I realized that I would be doing all of the cooking in one take and that I had no one available to help me film, I started to get a little worried about the quality of the video.

I really wish I had more money so that I could afford more food in order to do multiple takes. You’ll notice there’s no technique being shown in the video; that’s because I had to hold one hand while doing everything (also, my technique is wrong, but that’s a story for another day). The one handed shakey cam can get really old really quickly, but please stick with the video: you might actually learn how to make something delicious!

This is the link to the recipe I was going off of when I made the chops. As for the fries, I don’t really have a recipe: it’s just a thing that you sort of learn new things when you make more. I had been meaning to make the pork recipe for a while and the chops went on sale for a pretty good price that week so I finally caved and decided to try out the recipe. I had some leftover sweet potatoes from a few other cooking experiments and decided to chop those up into fries. They made an excellent side dish to the pork. I would highly recommend some broccoli or collard greens to go along with this dish, I just didn’t have much money to spend to get vegetables to go with it.

Again, I ran all of the clips through windows movie maker and added transitions where appropriate and titles. Please excuse how disorganized the clip seems, I was trying to do too much at once between filming and cooking. But the chops turned out fantastically, and that pan sauce I mention making was excellent as well (it was my first time making a pan sauce).

6/16 stars down. Good eats, everyone!

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Saturday Morning

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I recorded this five second video in order to convey my Saturday morning yesterday. I woke up, and immediately realized I have gotten yet another cold this semester–I’ve determined that college is a petri dish for sickness. Anyways, my immediate reaction to my cold was this. I recorded it, uploaded it, and edited it–just basic trimming. This was the result. Comments and criticism is welcome.

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3 Stars: A 5 Second Disaster

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Hi everyone! It’s been a while. I’ve been busy working on a few of my videos for these 2 weeks’ assignments. For the first assignment, I made a “5 Second Film.”

This is a short film I like to call “Nerf Assassin.” I found a nerf gun the other day and have been having a lot of fun with it. You might see it as a prop in a few other videos even. Anyways, I got to thinking about how the movie “Doom” was shot entirely from a first person perspective from behind a gun, so I thought I would do the same thing. My friend Rob was showing his gun to our friend Mu and I ducked behind the counter and popped a quick shot off. This led to a massive nerf war in which our apartment was thrown into utter chaos.

In order to edit this, I downloaded the video from my camera and ran it through windows movie maker. I just added the title and that was all that was really necessary. No need for transitions or anything.

Of course, I should mention that this was just a random video I shot that was better than the video I had originally planned to be my five second video: the adventure of Canada Man!

Haha that was awful. I had wanted to create a Canadian super hero who would play up the stereotype of Canadians always apologizing. The problem was, in our first attempt at filming, Mu called me Cameraman instead of Canada man and I was still cracking up about that in this second (or third) attempt. Oh, and that’s a Canadian flag that I used as a cape.

3/16 Stars down!

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There Will Be Bad TV

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Video Assignment Count: 9

Well I finally decided to upload a video assignment I completed earlier in the week: Redub the Audio. Here it is:

When I first started doing this assingment I knew immediately that I wanted to use a clip from There Will Be Blood. The majority of this movies is silent, making the sparse moments of dialogue even more meaningful. THe opening of the film dosen’t have dialogue for nearly 10-20 minutes. As such, with the popularity of the film–a well deserved accomplishment–many people can easily identify a quote form the fim especially the now classic milkshake sequence. So when it came time to pick a moment form this film to redub I went right to that scene:

Now came the really tricky part: What the hell was I going to dub over this? I knew I wouldn’t have any problem recording and editing the footage. All that was need was to go into Final Cut Pro, detach the audio, and delete the first couple of minutes. I wanted to leave the ending in because I didn’t want the entire clip to be my voice. Plus, by having Eli respond to what I was saying it makes it just seem a little more realistic.

Originally I had planned on using my old trusty Audacity application to record the voice over, but I had a whim to see if Final Cut Pro had a feature which would let me do this, and lo and behold it did. This made things easire, but I still had the problem of having no idea what to talk about.

Prof. Levine’s triste on the horros of academia was an inspiration (the one on the assignment page), and this one was a jumping off point as well. I still had no idea and did about 20 or so attempts but ended up abondoning them half way through. Then I saw this:

and i completely lost my shit and faith in humanity

So it just came to me, berate television for its continued stupidity. After that everything fell into place and worked out dandy. In retrospect I will say that sound editing has not been my forte but I’m slowly getting better at it.

ONWARD!!

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Chicken: It’s What’s For Dinner

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So, for my final video assignment, I saved the best for last. How so? Well it’s the cooliest, the best I worked on, the longest, AND I got to eat it afterwards! So what is this amazing assignment? ITS A COOKING SHOW!! The main course? Chicken Diable.

So lucky me, my girlfriend loves my cooking. (Not, I hate to cook lol) But anyways, I told her I would make her dinner if she would record me doing it…now who would say no to that?! So, I now had a project to accomplish.

I need a set…my apartments kitchen is small and nasty…can I use your house? Sure. Awesomeness Points: Olivia – 1 Rob – 0
She proceeds to buy the ingredients before I come over…
Awesomeness Points: Olivia – 2 Rob – 0
Agrees to record me while I cook dinner…
Awesomeness Points: Olivia – 3 Rob – 0
I made a delicious dinner and provided comedy for the evening…
Awesomeness Points: Olivia – 3 Rob – 1

Okay, so apparently I’m not that awesome, but that’s alright because I got to make a really cool, first-ever, cooking show! I recorded the video and then uploaded it to Windows Movie Maker. This episode didn’t get any flashy voiceovers…this was do or die during the production…and although I died a few times, I managed to conquer the food/cooking show! Although I didn’t edit audio, I edited the HECK out of the video. I was hacking and whacking clips left and right. I cut the video time in half, and still have tons of outtakes and bloopers(I recommend them…but then again, I think I’m hilarious and you may not…YOUR LOSS). I continued with making a title, adding credits, and making a blooper real. So this video is the real deal. I hope you enjoy!

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New assignment! Narrative Ambiance

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Funnily enough, this whole thing came about because I was attempting to do the Make it Constanza Decent assignment in which you film a day in your life, and my footage ended up being kind of crappy. I was happy with some of it, though, and wanted to use it for something in video week, so I figured I might as well make up an assignment to suit the resources I had. 4Life, right?

You can check out this brand-spanking-new 3-star assignment in the Assignment Bank.

Here’s the final version of my project, a favorite poem set to music and original video:

In creating this assignment, I was heavily inspired by the collection “Words for You,” a CD compilation of famous poems read by equally famous actors and set to appropriate music. My favorite of the entire collection is the inimitable (and weirdly attractive) Benedict Cumberbatch reading Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

I’ve listened to it countless times, and as with each poem in the collection, I’m always impressed by how well the music fits the narration, the tempo and the tone of the poem.

As someone who would probably dissolve into nothing but poems if given the option, I couldn’t help but think of Millay’s beautiful and haunting poem “Travel” while I was heading home on the train. In point of fact, that particular piece is rarely out of my thoughts; for most of my four years at UMW, I’ve lived in a dorm or apartment where I can hear the train whistles she describes.

To create this video, I first shot some footage at the Fredericksburg train station and on the train itself with my digital camera. Next I uploaded it into Windows Movie Maker and edited down the excess video I’d shot into only the best few clips, adding gradual transitions between each one to compliment the overall feel I wanted for the video. After that I visited the wonderful Incompetech.com to find background music that would suit the poem, and ended up settling on a piece called Winter Chimes. After some serious editing in Audacity to make the song fit the video in terms of length (including altering the speed and pitch of the song), I recorded myself reading Millay’s poem with my handheld digital recorder. After uploading and converting the audio using Online-Convert.com, I imported it into Audacity and started fitting it to my music. This proved to be the most hardest part of the process for me—I’m an avowed perfectionist, and making sure the narration matched up at least somewhat rhythmically to the music turned out to be much more difficult than I’d anticipated. Next time I’ll probably just record myself reading whatever text I want to give a musical background while listening to the music, so I can keep it to tempo naturally.

Once I had my background music and narration complete, all I had to do was slap it onto the video, upload it to YouTube and hustle my butt over here to do the writeup! Awesome.

I think this assignment could be a useful one for a number of reasons. First of all, I’d hope that students attempting it would give real thought to how they are creating a mood through the combination of video, music, the content of their text and the tone of their narration. Second, getting the final video to both sound good and look good are dependent upon a student’s ability to do at least basic video and audio editing—you can’t just read something and chuck it in with a couple clips of a running puppy and a Yanni song and expect it to be meaningful. There’s got to be some thought as to when the music starts and stops, when the narration cuts in and out, and what visual elements are playing at the same time. Third, a requirement of the assignment as I’m going to write it is for students to shoot their own original video, which will require them to think about composition, lighting, setting, and the kind of tools they’re using to film. Overall, they should be trying to create a video that tells a story, or at least enhances the story being told by the text they’ve chosen to read.

Huh. Maybe this ought to be a 4-star assignment after all?

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EMS Skills for Beginners

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Hmmm, after one video, I’m thinking I could possibly make my own series of EMS tutorials to help teach new members down at the station! (Maybe someday)

This assignment was titled Everyday Modern Marvels. The assignment is to create or assemble something and overlay with audio each step. Well, I sure am becoming a master at overlaying audio on my videos in Windows Movie Maker, so how hard could this be?! Let’s give it a whirl!

Now, there are a TON of things to learn as you are coming into the EMS field as a newbie. (But it is okay, we were all there at one point in our lives too) We even developed a packet program to help introduce new members to specific items on the unit and basic knowledge on how to use them. But, not to get sidetracked, the most frequently asked question to me down at the station is, “Hey Rob, can you show me how to change the portable oxygen tank?” Surrrrrrre, it’s a simple task, anyone can do it, and it only takes like 3 minutes! But here, let me have my video explain:

I taped the video using the girlfriend’s camera…and I guess I forgot to credit her for recording the video for me…whoops. Uploaded the video to Windows Movie Maker and turned the video audio down once again. I then used Audacity to record my voiceover on how to assemble the oxygen tank. I also grabbed a How It’s Made audio soundtrack off of YouTube using Fastest Youtube Downloader and then placing that with my voiceover on Audacity. I then exported the file as a MP3, and imported it into WMM to create the video you just watched!

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What is Lilo thinking about?

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The assignment, What do Pets think about?, entails that you take a series of video sequences of your pet in contemplating mode and narrate it. I took a different approach to this assignment partly because my audio sound would not record and partly because my pets are an hour away. I really like doing assignments that involve my pets so I took somewhat of different view on what this assignment was…

I have videos of my dog on my phone. They are very brief, but none in contemplating mode. The video of Lilo chasing the reflection off my mom’s iPad is the most recent one I have. So the original plan was to take this video and lay audio over it of what I think was going through her small little brain at the time. However, there are always complications with good ideas. I couldn’t record anything. Audacity wasn’t picking up my voice or maybe my microphone isn’t working. I have no idea. So after about an hour or so of trying to fix this, I decided to just add titles and music.

When I just had the video in the timeline, I thought it was boring. I then added the first few slides beginning the story and having other pictures of her. I thought it added a little something extra to the video. For some reason, I youtubed circus music. Just the way she prance and jumps around made me think of the circus. I found this great clip. I had to cut some of it off using audacity (it would work for this of course) and put it into the movie. I thought it fit with her jumps and looking around pretty well. It adds a bit of excitement to the scene. The font for the titles just came up automatically when I started typing in the words. I really liked it. It seemed fun and fit the scenes. I think it may have been a font I used previously, but it worked well with this movie too.

Lilo is one of the sweetest dogs ever, however she really isn’t the smartest. She was mesmerized by this reflection for quite some time. She is definitely ditsy, so I don’t think much really crosses her mind. I call her the goldfish dog. Her brain reboots after around three seconds. However, she wasn’t bred for her brains. She was bred for racing. She has already won a champion reserve at the National Competition level and she is only 7 months. I’m very proud of her!

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My First Video Assignment…Here We Go!

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Title: Movie Scenes That Changed Our Lives

Description: For this assignment I was asked to select scenes from 3-5 movies. These scenes were supposed to represent scenes that changed mu life or made some sort of dramatic, traumatic, lasting, or emotional impact on me. After selecting the scenes, I was asked to create a video that shows the scenes and includes audio/video of me describing what it is about the scene that made a significant impact on me.

Inspiration: When I first read the description of this assignment I was immediately drawn to it. I felt that it would not only be interesting to do, but that it would remind me of those critical times in my life where a movie has really impacted me in a way that I never expected it to. The top five movies that I picked where A Time to Kill, The Pursuit of Happiness, and The Help. The Pursuit of Happiness made me think of my mom and how much she has sacrificed for me. It also inspires me to go out there and achieve my goals and dreams. A Time to Kill and The Help are constant reminder to me of how my ancestors have been treated in America. They also remind me everyday to push myself because I am part of a generation that has a choice now.

Process: First, I went on Youtube and a scene from each movie that captured the emotions that I wanted to convey in my video project. I then downloaded the videos to my computer using a program that I downloaded offline. Here is a link to the program:

YoutubeDownloader

I then put the videos into Windows Movie Maker. I added a title scene, a caption scene before each movie clip, and then a credit block at the end. For each movie scene I added the page curl animation to introduce the movie scene.

Previous Example: Here are the links of two previous examples of this assignment. Out of the two examples I felt that the first one definitely got the message of this assignment across more. The second assignment, even though it told a story about that person’s childhood, did not come across as something that was life changing. It was more about the reminiscing on movies that they watched during their childhood. The first example, not only involves more emotions, but I was able to relate to it way more than the second one.

Example 1

Example 2

My Video: