Video Project Count: 5

So finally did the Return to the Silent Era assignment. It was fun, and this was the end result:

To make this video, it took a little bit of work. The most important of which was to pick out what I wanted to re-stylize. Of course I’ve already done a lot of work with The Big Lebowski previously in this class, so naturally that was one of the films I considered. I think why I chose to make a portion of this film as a silent movie is that the film itself relies so much on dialogue. Like most Cohen brother films the humor and interest of the film comes from character interactions. Also, as anyone to quote a Cohen brother film and they’ll likely give you a Lebowski quote.

With that in mind I decided to take on one of the most commonly quoted films, in either jest or anger: Walter berating Smokey over an alleged bowling violation. After I downloaded this original material to work with:

I threw it into Final Cut Pro and began to add film effects. I can’t remember exactly which ones I used exactly–there was a lot of experimentation–but in the end I ended up using about 4-5 different effects to get the look I wanted. Also something I remembered reading was that earlier films had a different frame/second ratio (fps ratio). So to simulate this I sped up the clip really fast and then toyed with making it slower by degrees till I look more old timey.

The hardest part was the title cards. If an image is too small with will come out blurry when inserted into film. So I had to hunt down a good title card and make it bigger. Props to Alan Levine’s blog for the source material here. This also explains why the text is so damn big, I kept coming out blurry since it was pasted over a blurry image (to get the text I just used the text files in Final Cut Pro). It was also while doing this that I noticed that most of the other students were doing moive trailers, example here. At this point I said, “Shit.” but decided I was too much in the hole now to go back, so i just focused on making my video the best I could.

Music was a bit tricky cuz length and timing were off, but I just tried to edit the song at good enough points and elongated it. It got the music form this website, couldn’t have been more perfect.

Anyhoo thats about it. Here’s a screenshot of what all that looked like:

ONWARD!!!!

The assignment Watching Movies with the Stereo on seemed pretty basic. It involves to take a clip of a movie and add audio that somehow fits with the clip. When I looked at it I wasn’t aware of how cutting the movie and the music to fit together is key! I tried looking at some examples but found that most of the websites didn’t work (a problem I seem to be running into a lot). However, the two examples that were on the assignment gave me an idea. The music really fit with the beat of the clips. My personal favorite was the Circle of Life/Frankstein combinations. The play on the clip of making Frankstein is a bit comical with the meaning of the Circle of Life song.

I’m not sure why I chose this assignment. I think it was mainly because it seemed simple to me. And I really liked the examples that were with it. When I decided to do this assignment my mind blanked on a song and movie that would go together. So, like I always do, I asked my roommate. We sat there and contemplated movies (She’s the Man and UP). I decided I definitely wanted to do an animated movie. As we were discussing I also decided that a play on words would work for this assignment. We finally came up with the song Howling for you by the Black Keys. We figured a dog movie would go perfect with this song. The next step was coming up with a movie with dogs (All dogs go to Heaven, Oliver and Company, and Homeward Bound all came to mind). We decided the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene would go great. I realized this was a slower clip and I assumed I was going to have to speed it up a bit to go along with the upbeat of the song. However, when I played them separately together there was a part in the clip that would fit perfectly with the song. I converted the movie clip using Real Player and uploaded it to Windows Movie Maker. The song and the clip went perfectly together! I was absolutely thrilled! I didn’t have to cut the song or anything! As I watched how they went together, I decided that the older washed out colors didn’t fit with the song. I wanted something a bit more modern. The first effect I tried was threshold, but it made some parts really bright with blues and reds, then the rest of the scene was black. It was cool, but too harsh. The next one I tried was Edge Detection. I thought it looked really cool! It was all white with a slight hint of color in the lines and outlined the main parts of the scene. It gave an extra touch to the clip.

I showed this video to my other roommate and she thought the play on words was hilarious. She also suggested that I add title credits to the end just to say the name of the song and the movie the clip was from. I agreed.

I really like how the clip and song coordinate together. The story of the clip is of two dogs who are in love and Tramp (the boy dog) is trying to impress Lady (the girl dog) by presenting her a fancy meal even though he is a dog with no home and just roams the street. The story of the song really plays into this. It’s about how the singer really wants the girl.

Animated Music Video

Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.
For examples check out youtube and type in “AMV”, or look at this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vvTQDrPec

This is a 4 star assignment

I chose to do this assignment because I always have loved watching animated movies and TV shows.  Animation has really come a long way since really early animations.  There has been more that go into them, such as much vivid color and more realistic looking people. For this assignment I am using clips from the TV show the Powerpuff Girls.  When I was a kid I loved the Powerpuff Girls.  This was my favorite show on Cartoon Network, when I watched cartoon network.  Looking back on the animation of the Powerpuff Girls has really improved since their very first episode.  The color became more vivid and the animations became clearer.  I really liked watching the Powerpuff Girls because they were the first show I watched where there was a heroine (well in this case 3 heroine’s) than just heroes.  This show really showed that girls can do anything that they can put their mind to.  For my animated music video I am going to be taking clips from the Powerpuff Girl episode called the Rowdy Ruff Boys.  This episode is about a new group of super villains in the Town of Towns-ville that are boy versions of the Power Puff Girls.  They think they’re better and want to destroy the Powerpuff Girls. In the end though they are defeated.  I found a two part episode on YouTube and downloaded to my computer as an MP4 file using PwnYoube.  Here are the links to the episode I found.  For this assignment I used MPEG stream clip to cut out certain clips from the episode.  (I feel really comfortable using MPEG stream clip now ).

For the music part of this assignment I was looking through songs that I thought would go really well for what I want the message in my animated music video to portray.  Originally I wanted to use the song Rolling in the Deep by ADELE , but then I decided that the lyrics didn’t give the message I wanted.  The message I want this video to portray is that all girls can do anything they want, even if boys don’t think they can.  The song I decided to use is called Girls Can Too by Play.  I used to listen to this song a lot when I was younger because my friend gave me a Play CD once.  This song really conveys the message that girls can do anything that boys can do.  And it’s also about following your dreams as well.  For this assignment I didn’t realize how much time it would take to get clips and edit clips to fit the lyrics of the song, but it was worth it in the end.  I’m happy with how this video came out.

2 examples of other students work:  I had fun reviewing two different peoples work on this assignment.  It helped me better focus on what I want my animated music video to look like.  These reviews were taken from my pre production post that I did last week. (I thought since I already reviewed them I can just paste them in here).

1. Old Squirrel Cartoon: I really liked this music video for this cartoon.  I have never watched this old Squirrel Cartoon before but  I have to say the song Promiscuous Girl by Nelly Furtado and Timberland went really well with what was happening in the cartoon.  I like how this person edited some of the clip to include the sound from the cartoon, while most of what you heard was the music playing.

2.  Phineas and Ferb: I picked this one to review because I have heard of the show Phineas and Ferb and watched a few of the episodes when I was younger. I like how in this post the user showed us how they made the video.  This person also included introduction text that told me what the video was called, and this person also included a credit at the end that cited their sources.  I liked how the images went with the lyrics in the song, but I thought the point of this assignment was to make an animated music video with actual clips from the cartoon.  With that said the clips were well put together, and I enjoyed watching this cartoon music video.

Below is my embedded version of my animated music video:

As always feedback is appreciated.  I would love to know what you think and what I can improve on for my next few assignments that I have to do for this week.

Framed two stars

“Take a 2 minute video and go through the frames until you find the one that best represents the overall story of your video.”

I choose to use this trailer for the Pursuit of Happyness:

and I think this frame sums up the trailer and movie in general:

This scene is when Will solves a Rubiks Cube after the man in the car with him tells him he can’t, which is a pretty major theme in the movie. You can do anything you set your mind to and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I made this frame by finding a Pursuit of Happyness trailer on youtube, and taking a screen shot of the frame I wanted.

Do the Hitch Cut 4 stars

“Make two versions of a shortthree-shot video — in each instance maintaining the first and third shots, but changing out the second shot in each. Can you get a completely different result from your viewer? “

This video shows that emotions are can be interpreted in many ways. This first take of this video the guy sees a puppy learning to walk, then he makes an expression looking awed by the cuteness. The next take the guy sees a huge body builder and his same expression looks intimidated and fearful. I don’t think this example is as good as the one in the assignment description, but it works.

To make this video I searched for facial expressions on youtube and found a video of a guy making different faces, uploaded it to iMovie, cut two of the faces into a new project then duplicated them.  Then I found a video of puppies and a video of a body builder and cut clips of those videos into the project. I decided not to have audio in attempts to not sway the mood or tone of the video, letting the viewer impose their own tone.