“Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure.”
I decided to “supercut” clips of Will Ferrell being overly dramatic.
For this assignment the first thing I thought of after reading overused themes was Will Ferrell. He is the same character is EVERY movie he’s in! He can be funny but its always the same tactic, being over dramatic in average situations. The montage is just a few scenes of many, I’m sure you can think of others.
To make the montage I searched for clips of Will on youtube, downloaded them via PwnYouTube imported them to iMovie, cut the bits I wanted into a new project and uploaded it to youtube
“Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each.”
I choose to use Funny Guys as my archetype:
For this project I choose the archetype funny guys, These 5, Jonah Hill, Steve Carrell, Will Ferrel, Michael Cera and Zach Galifainakis are definitely my favorites. They are a certain type of funny, witty seemingly without having to try. The audio is a clip on Zach laughing in one of my favorite movies, Due Date.
I made the video by googling images of all of the guys, dragging those photos to iMovie, recording the audio from a youtube clip through audacity, adding the audio and wah la!
“Pick a song (or a minute from a song) and create a video that displays a picture representing the lyrics”
I choose to visualize the song Red by Taylor Swift:
This song was pretty easy to visualize, the analogies in the lyrics are pretty straight forward in describing the intended visuals. I went with a pretty literal theme.
To make the video I google searched for the pictures I wanted(links below), saved them to my desktop, dragged them into a new project in iMovie. Then I uploaded the song from iTunes and had to adjust the length of time the pictures were on the screen by right clicking the photos and going to “Clip adjustments” so that the pictures would line up with the lyrics.
In film, the design of opening credits can be an art unto itself. For this assignment, take an existing movie’s opening credits, and redo it in an alternate style that still honors the plot and style of the movie– or make it radically different. See examples of the redone credits for The Good The Bad and The Ugly and Hitchock’s Rear Window. Include in your blog post a clip or screenshots of the original credits to show the difference between that and what you create.
This is a 4 star assignment
I chose to do this assignment because while watching movies watching the opening credits is one of my favorite parts. It’s fun to see how they are done. I have noticed that in more recent movies there are no opening credits. It just shows the title of the movie. Sometimes at the end they have more of an opening credits scene such as the movie the Avengers. I think the credits are very important in the movie because there are so many people that help to make the movie go really well.
The movie I decided to redo the credits for it Letters to Juliet. It is one of my favorite movies that is fairly recent that has opening credits. I first watched the opening credits of the movie so that I knew the right order and names of who was in the movie as well as who produced it. This movie is a typical love story and for the opening credits I want to change the background images to show more of the title of the movie. In the original opening credits that you can view here you can see here there are multiple pictures being shown of love that introduce the credits. I decided to keep the same script font for the words, but the images I added were different. They are pictures of writing letters and at the very end a picture of Romeo and Juliet. Writing letters is a story itself because when you write a letter you are telling someone else a story. For the song in the background I decided to use the song Listen to Your Heart by DHT. Letters to Juliet really relates to this song because it’s about following your heart to make the right choice in who you really love. I already had the song in iTunes so it was easy just to upload it to Window’s Movie Maker. When formatting the credits I tried to organize them so they would appear at different places throughout the video. Listen to Your Heart is a long song and I only included half of it in this video. I faded out the sound at the end of the video so it would sound more like an ending. I also made the color of the font red because it’s the color I associated with love. Such as how Valentine’s Day colors are always red and pink. At the end of my video I added a credits page saying that I made the video and that it is for ds106 and I credited the song and where I found the images.
Review of 2 previously done assignments: A lot of the already done assignments for this were either deleted by the user or their blog was no longer active and the internet could not open the page. There were very few to choose from to review but I did find two to review.
1. The Good the Bad and the Ugly credit remake: I have never seen this movie but I thought that this video was really well done. I really liked how the pictures came up like they were being painted on the screen. I also really liked the music went well with the timing of the words. This video was really well done.
2. The Notebook: I love the movie and book the Notebook. I thought this credits redux was really good. I really liked the beach scene and music. After watching this video I then went to watch the original opening credits. The credits redux really defines how the original credits opened up. I also really like the font of the credits redux. This video was really well done, my once concern is that the title of the movie didn’t appear at the same time as the original opening. Though I really like how the title appears on the rock at the end of the video.
Below is my embedded YouTube video, as always any comments and feedback is appreciated.
I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era assignment. This is worth five stars. The gist of the assignment is to turn a movie trailer (I did the Mean Girls trailer) into a silent movie. For instance, you take the sound away, make it look dated and add “cue cards.” I looked at one about Nemo that was done extremely well as a “background” on what mine should look like. The color of this one was very well done, as is the telling of the plot. However, the best one I saw was Martha’s on Young Teen Wolf. Amazing! The idea for a real cue card is fantastic. The music sounds realistic.
I choose this assingmnet honestly because I already did the “pre-production” for it. I had a picture of what I wanted to happen before I did it and I wanted to make sure my video making went somewhat smoothly. The inspriation was a picture of what Victorian/roaring 20s Mean Girls looked like. Did they “know the rules of feminism”? Did they were pink dresses on Wednesdays and flapper dresses only once a week?
This is part of a story because of what Mean Girls is. Tina Fey, one of the writers, meant it to be a sarcastic joke on how young women act and how they act towards each other. She meant it as a “ha I know this is funny, but it needs to change in our society” (Fey is a big feminist). I feel just thinking about the history of how women have always been vindictive toward each other and how it hasn’t really changed. How would those roaring 20s Mean Girls compare to the ones we have today?
Also, this is just a really good movie.
The process was to use PwnYouTube to snag the Mean Girl trailer off of Youtube. After that took forever to download, I threw that down into iMovie. Just to be clear, this is my first time using iMovie seriously. Then I took it in sections and made it “aged” by using iMovie’s pre-set template. Then I added “cue cards”/text over top of it. This was the hardest part. I couldn’t get it to just be for a few seconds. I played with it and realized the “duration” was for the “cue card” not the clip. After I did that for the rest of the clips, I added in transitions between the clips (Note: it is extremely hard to include all the plot, so to someone who has never seen Mean Girls, this is not what it is about exactly…). Then I went and speed them up by 150%. I left the muting part to last.
This was a mistake.
There are bits and pieces for some reason that just didn’t mute. They were mute in iMovie, I promise. When I played it there, it was actually silent. Then I uploaded it to Youtube and there were little chipmunk voices on some parts!
I don’t get it. So then I went back and tried to find the silly bits that weren’t muted… And they all were. I have no clue. Plus, it was already uploaded and my computer was sounding like a race car, which is a terrible noise to hear from a relatively new Macbook (p.s. does any one have a solution for this? I only had Safari and iMovie open!).
Then I went and downloaded this lovely piano music. The original was way to slow so I popped that bad boy into Audacity and speed it up by like 33% and changed the pitch to like C#. I can’t tell if it sounds good/realistic or like an organ is dying.
Anywho, besides that whole muting snafu, which kind of defeats the purpose of “silent” movie, I learned a lot from this. I had no clue iMovie had all of those presets before, nor did I know it was so “powerful.” It was a really good experience!
Also, the font is tiny. Forgive me, many first time mistakes.
Create a video that artistically presents a single number in artful ways- show how it is represented in the world or nature. Add a relevant musical track, no narration, let the number and the visuals tell the story. See Darren Kuropatwa’s Number 9
This is a 3 star assignment
When I came across this assignment in the video assignment repository I immediately thought of the song. One by Three Dog Night. This song made my number choice easy, as I am going to pick number one. For this assignment I have found many pictures with the number one and it looking lonely. There are also going to be pictures of just the number one, and the number one written out.
2 Reviews of Previously done work:
1. Number 9 by Darren Kuropatwa: This is the once that is shown as the example. I really like the number 9 personally. When I used to play soccer for fun in elementary school I always wanted to have the shirt with 9 on the back. I really liked how this video included everything that related to number 9. I also really liked how at the end of the video there were facts about the number 9. I also love how in the back ground is someone saying Number 9, number 9. This video was really well done.
2. Number 1: I decided to review the number that I plan on working with as well. Though I am not a big fan of the kind of music played in the background the song was relevant to the number 1. I really like how this person found different ways to create the number 1. Though I have to say that after watching the entire video I think this person could have kept more pictures of the number 1 or items that represent the number 1. I was starting at a blank video screen at 1 minute and 25 seconds. The whole video time was 3 minutes and 50 seconds. Over half of the video was a black screen.
The links below are for all the images in this video in order: I believe that the descriptions that I gave the pictures in order tell a story itself, about different uses of the numebr one. One is used in a lot of different situations and one stands alone by itself. These are all images of just one thing. They all stand alone.
The images I chose to be in this video all represent 1 and how it can be lonely as well as the different uses of the number one in band names or how its represented by people and things. You’re probably wondering why there is the number 2, and the words yes and no in this video. I’ll tell you why. They represent the lyrics in the song. Watch the video and you will see. While making this video I gathered many images from google images (as you can see linked above) and uploaded them into Windows movie maker. I then added the song into this by clicking the add music option in window’s movie maker. After that I then ordered the images in a way so they fit the song. This time while using window’s movie maker I added text to give my video a title and at the end I added credits by using the credits option in window’s movie maker. I’m really happy with how this video came out. I think this is some of my better video work. I have definitely been feeling more comfortable using Window’s movie maker.
Below is my embedded YouTube video, again any feedback is appreciated.
To me, Return to the Silent Era seemed like such a unique project. It involves taking a modern movie and transforming it into a time piece. To give it an old timey feel, it was suggested to change it to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, take away the sound, add music, and maybe some title cards too. I got some really good ideas from examples. However, most were done with iMovie and it took me some time to figure out how to do it with Windows Movie Maker. My favorite example was one done with Mean Girls. It is actually one of my friend’s projects. She did a really good job in speeding up the movie. It was the first example I looked at so I got a feel for the “antiquity” part of the assignment. I also think the movie was a really good choice because the idea of it is very far from the older Silent Movies. The next example I looked at was Martha’s on Teen Wolf. I loved how she changed the wording to words they might have used in older times. It gave a really unique feel to the video. She also used unique cue cards. Using these two examples I put my own twist on Finding Neemo.
I chose this assignment because it is extremely unique. Silent Movies are rarely seen anymore. In fact, more effects are being added to a movie every day. I believe that silent movies really capture the actual story without extra things being added. Don’t get me wrong, special effects can add so much to a movie but I think occasionally it’s nice to just watch a good story. So the real reason I chose Finding Neemo is because it truly is my favorite movie. I think the animation in it is awesome. It’s very realistic to actual fish movement (having taking Bio of Fish and spent a summer working in an aquarium I would know). The story is also very inspiring. It’s about a fish who comes out of his shell to save his son and the adventure of a son getting into a bit of trouble. In the end, everything is happy. The two are reunited and life is wonderful. So of course, this was the story I was going to put the characters in silence. I really want the story to stand out and taking away vocals really makes that happen.
I started with Pre-Production first. I got all of my materials together including: Finding Neemo Trailer, tools I needed to use, an idea of what effects to use, and a sample of my music. I have never really used Windows Movie Maker before so it was a bit of an on-going tough process. I first had problems uploading my video to it. Apparently WMM doesn’t work well with mp4. So I downloaded real player to convert it to a .wmv file. It worked like a charm. I then uploaded my video to WMM and sat and stared for about 15 minutes. I had no idea what to do. So, I went for the basics. I found the effects bar and dragged the “black and white” effects to my movie. I didn’t like it, so I deleted that effects. I then added the sepia effects and that was better. The black and white was too harsh for me. It was then I found the “film age, old” effects. And it was perfect. Slowly this film was starting to look like a silent movie. But, there was one problem: the sounds. I had no idea how to delete the vocals on the movie. I started playing around with volume and random buttons. I finally googled it and found a simple explanation: Clip tab, audio, mute. So simple! It still wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to add in some sort of titles. I didn’t like the look of adding the titles and separating the clip. With WMM you could only change the back ground color (Martha’s were much cooler) so I added the titles on the clip. I actually really liked how the captions turned out. I played around with the font until I came across one that had a “flow” to it. I first had them in black, but they didn’t stand out enough. And since it was supposed to be colorless I changed it to white and it turned out perfectly! I thought everything was too slow so I then sped up the movie. There were already a few frantic clips so I didn’t speed it up too much (FYI a hint, speed up the movie before adding in clips). The next step was the music. I searched youtube for a ragtime piano music. I looked through a lot of them and didn’t like them. Some had vocals, some were too slow, some just didn’t sound right. The music I chose was actually on the first page I had just skipped over it because it was too slow. I decided to play with it. I loaded it into audacity and sped it up a bit. I also changed the tempo some too. I thought it sounded OK, so I added it to the film. The music is actually my favorite part! I think it goes along perfectly with the beat of the characters in the movie!
The credits were the last piece. I wanted to give credit where credit was due (mainly me, but added in Disney and Pixar too). I also felt since it was originally a trailer it left the audience hanging. That wasn’t the silent movie way so I added in what happens in the end on the credits too. There are many things I could have added (old fashion words, cool title slides) but I felt the way I put everything together had the effect I was shooting for. I didn’t want to change the story around, just make it old fashioned. I really like how the whole thing came together in the end.
I tried to get some feedback on this project, but was wildly unsuccessful. I showed my mom when I went home to vote and she said it was “cute” and “good work”. Not much enthusiasm there… And then there was my roommate who really liked it but laughed at the amount of time and how frustrated I got with it. She sort of went through the process with me and had to listen to the tangents I went on about how WMM wouldn’t work. However, the best feedback is how proud I am of the video (I know, cheesy right?)
So I think the overall story is how I worked through my problems and created this piece. It was my first time working with WMM and other tools and had to figure out a few quirks to get going. This is just a start of my video work and there is more to come. I’m sure I will have more difficulties and frustrations to come with those projects however, now I have an idea of how to work through them (mainly Google).
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form is the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars. One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search
This is a 5 star assignment
I chose this assignment because it really interested me. I never have seen a silent film and that’s because they were not around when I was growing up. I picked the movie Monsters Inc and the song to go with . I wanted to make this funny Disney Pixar movie to look more scary and suspenseful. I know the assignment said that the movie trailer should be 3-5 minutes but it is hard to find a movie trailer that long.
In my pre production work I reviewed two already done silent movie trailers. One was for the Disney Pixar’s Up and the other was for The Hunger Games Silent Trailer. I really enjoyed watching both of them. I will have to say for the Hunger Games silent movie trailer the music didn’t go nearly as well with what was happening in the trailer. In the Up I thought the movie trailer the music went really well with what was happening in the movie. From these movie trailer I decided to do was to have a song that went well with the movie as well as make the movie look more like a scary movie than a funny movie for kids.
I first downloaded a clip using PwnYoutube that included the Monsters Inc trailer for the new 3D release of the movie. I then put the movie into windows movie maker. I changed the back ground to black and white and eliminated the sound. Then I added the song, I have already had this song previous bought and downloaded from itunes. I then uploaded this video to YouTube.
This is the first video assignment that I have completed, and the first real video editing that I have done. Any comments with feedback will be appreciated on all of my video assignments that I do over these next 2 weeks.
Below is my embedded video for the assignment Return to the Silent Era:
This is video assignment 448! It is worth three stars and the assignment description was:
“Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies.”
Before beginning this assignment I watched a few examples, my favorite was Minions with an F in Evil because I thought it was a very unique archetype and it made me laugh! I also liked the Librarian example because it too was funny and unique in my opinion (just A LOT longer than 5 seconds).
After watching a few examples, I decided to create a video about princesses! Disney princesses basically consumed mine and my sister’s childhood. We still have so many VHS tapes and probably 95% of them are old Disney movies. This project definitely allowed me to reminisce, life was so much easier when all we had to worry about was the princess finding her prince. I think most people know the basic story line of many Disney princesses. I think this will be a video that others can relate to.
The first step in making this video was figuring which video clips to use! I searched YouTube for Disney princess clips and chose 5 that I thought would be good for the video (one from The Princess Diaries, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Snow White). After all 5 clips were downloaded, I had to cut them down to 1 second each (this was HARD). I tried to let the 1 second clips each demonstrate something new to each new Princess. (The amazing new room, the fancy under wear, legs, magical ball gown, and a life saving kiss) Once I had each clip trimmed down, I loaded each clip into Movie Maker and dragged them in to the order I wanted and then I added a text box on each clip (for those who can’t tell what is occurring with just one second of viewing time). I originally trimmed the clips in MPEG streamclip and then trimmed them a little bit more in movie maker, but I preferred Movie Maker’s trimming feature. It was a little less permanent (which is nice because I kept changing my mind). I didn’t add any opening title or ending credits because I really wanted this video to be exactly 5 seconds! And believe me that was quite a challenge!
I guess this is kind of its own, condensed princess story. If it had a narrator…
“Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a new princess, crowned just yesterday. This princess was in awe over her new fancy room and huge new bed, and even her underwear were fit for a princess or so she said. This princess transformed and became as beautiful and graceful as a dove, until she died and could only be saved by her a kiss from her one true love.”
I know its a bit cheesy, but I put in extra effort to make it rhyme, all good fairy-tales rhyme.
Part of the ds106 assignments this week includes doing pre-production work on two video assignments.
The first video assignment I chose to do was Return to the Silent Era. To get an idea of how to do the assignment, and what it should look and feel like in the end, I checked out Silent Star Wars and CogDog’s own Silent Harry. These gave me a good idea what to aim for with my own final product, and helped give me some ideas going into mine. I appreciated the clarity of the attributions at the end of CogDog’s clip, as that helped me understand what that writing at the end was supposed to be – it was completely illegible in Silent Star Wars.
Call me sappy, but I decided I really wanted to do Moulin Rouge for this assignment. I didn’t want to do that, though, if it was already over-used. I went through the assignments submitted already for quite a ways, and didn’t find a single one, so…it is decided.
Finding a clip from this movie was harder than I expected – the copyright hounds have been on the hunt for this movie. But I found two to choose from, and I’m excited. The clothing and setting make this movie a perfect candidate for a throwback style, and the movie already incorporates a lot of that kind of feel into it, so I plan to copy their style as much as possible during production. Black-and-white is a must, of course, and I like Alan’s trick from Silent Harry, of reducing saturation to nothing so that other effects can be used. I plan to use that and play with other effects.
I have to admit, though, I did end up finding several clips, and have yet to choose one. That will be tough. So I’m not linking to the clip just yet.
The other assignment I chose to do is Redub the Audio. I LOVED the example from The Network. I don’t know if that’s because I love the original so much, or what. But I really thought it was clever and well-done, anyway, although I do think this redub will mean more to those who have seen the original scene and movie. Maybe that’s the point.
With that thought in mind, I chose to redub a scene that anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock the past 20 years would know – Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. My husband convinced our daughter to watch that for movie night tonight, and it was an epic experience, indeed. There is no way I can possibly improve on this movie, but trust and believe, I will aim for and achieve awesomeness on some level. Here’s the clip I downloaded for this assignment.
Here’s the clip I downloaded for this assignment.
