My next assignment was Thumps Up for Ebert from the assignment bank. Usually, I don’t do assignments like this one, but it seemed interesting.
I wasn’t exactly sure where I would go with my tribute to Roger Ebert who passed away recently, so I started by browsing around on his site. I found this page about some of the best movies of the past 100 years. I figured this would be a fun way to pay tribute to him–string together some clips of the movies and some of his reviews of them. I picked three, Contact (1997), Fargo (1996), and Pulp Fiction (1994). I originally wanted to do more, but there were so few clips of the reviews of other movies I wanted to do, that I decided three would have to be enough.
Click here for links to all the videos that I used
I trimmed up most of the clips to make sure they were relevant and only snippets of the review. I didn’t want it to just repeat the actual reviews.
I think these three movies–and Ebert’s love for them–show his range of tastes. I think movie critics are often focused on one genre they like and hating all the others that aren’t “intelligent” enough. Ebert’s reviews of these three distinct films shows that he was not one-dimensional at all.
I hope I didn’t go too far off the assignment’s description. I thought about showing the funny side of Ebert (but the clip quality was terrible) or maybe having music in the background (but god, that’s so depressing).
In any case, this is my small tribute to a guy I grew up watching on TV.
What a better way to honor his contributions that a ds106 assignment (well there are likely much better ways), but here you go, Thumbs Up For Ebert:
Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky.
For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place him inside one of the movies he loved or hated. Or mash him up, Do anything to show some respect for Ebert’s devotion to not only appreciating film but teaching others.
I started with the song list for Muddy Waters, found a few in YouTube, landing eventually on a live 1973 performance of Got My Mojo Working– “Mojo” is such a gritty and suggestive word, coming from an African custom of a magic charm represented by objects in a bag — ” it is said to drive away evil spirits, keep good luck in the household, manipulate a fortune, and lure and persuade lovers.”
The song was a huge hit for Muddy Waters in the mid 1950s, listed in the top 500 all time songs by Rolling Stone, and has a long list of covers- though it was written by Preston Foster and originally recorded by Ann Cole and there was some copyright spats there. The courts stepped in and said Mojo was un-copyrightable:
MOJO is a commonplace part of the rhetoric of the culture of a substantial portion of the American people. As a figure of speech, the concept of having, or not having, one’s MOJO working is not something in which any one person could assert originality, or establish a proprietary right.
Kind of interesting to think about judges debating the merits of “one’s MOJO working”.
The song is more of a reference to the lack of the Mojo’s ability to work over the charm of a lover, but I thought of the way Ebert and Siskel went at each other, when they disagreed. I found many clips of this, and used ones from a set of outtakes and a bit of their interchange when they reviewed Jaws.
In iMovie, I dropped the Ebert clips on top of the music track, with the advanced features on using the Cutaway edit, essentially adding those clips on a new track. I edited the audio properties on these clips to duck other audio. And I added a few title bits, using the same effect (soft edge) and font.
Click to see full size
For the last title sequence, I grabbed again the first 15 seconds of the video, then detached the audio to slide under the closing title sequence (and deleted the video part of the music). The audio properties were edited for a manual 2 second fadeout.
Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky.
For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place him inside one of the movies he loved or hated. Or mash him up, Do anything to show some respect for Ebert’s devotion to not only appreciating film but teaching others.
