The Why So Serious assignment asked me to take a serious part of a movie, and overlay it with comedy audio. So I did just that, mixing the Bobadook and Seinfeld.

For those who don’t know, The Bobadook is an Australian horror movie that got a lot of critical acclaim along with some attention in the United States. I took the trailer for that movie and put the Seinfeld theme song over top of it. I thought of what an iconic horror movie was (Bobadook), and what a iconic comedy was (Seinfeld), and mashed them together.

I loved the idea of making a serious movie funny, so I took this assignment and ran with it.  I began by selecting my two scenes to mashup.  For my serious scene I chose the reentry clip from Gravity (one of my favorite movies).  Then I chose the proton pack scene from Ghostbusters as my funny audio clip. I downloaded these clips from YouTube, entered them in CyberLink PowerDirector, muted the Gravity scene, and overlaid the audio from the Ghostbusters scene.  I edited the order of some of the shots from Gravity to make the audio mesh better, and the result was pretty solid.  It does a fair job of demonstrating how important audio is for creating tone, and how two jarringly different pieces can come together in a pretty hilarious manner.  The final product is available below for your viewing pleasure.

First video assignment of the entire class! For this assignment, we’re supposed to take a serious scene from a movie, and then dub it with audio or music from a comedy. The serious scene I chose was the Raptor in the Kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, and I dubbed it with the song Yakety Sax, which was frequently used in The Benny Hill Show. That song was the first thing I thought of when I saw the assignment, and I just started searching for a serious and tense chase scene.

The process was fairly simple. I downloaded the scene from youtube, used youtube to mp3 to download the music from youtube, and then plopped both of them in Premiere Pro. It’s simple enough to trim audio and video in Premiere Pro; it’s very similar to Audacity, just with that video element. I haven’t used Premiere Pro nearly as much as Photoshop, so I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s way better than any free video editor I’ve used.

For this Video Assignment, I decided to go with Why So Serious and bring back an old favorite of mine, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking barrels and dub over words from Ron Burgundy.  I chose this scene because its a pretty serious scene about bluffing a Desert Eagle with replica guns.  I chose Ron Burgundy because a lot (if not all) the statements in that movie make no sense and are all the more funny for it.  The storyline for the scene is simple, the gang comes in, expecting to hold up the one man for something they thing he possesses using nothing but ski masks and fake guns.  The soon find out that the man isn’t buying their bluff and slowly escape with their lives.  If you were to mute the film completely, the video would suggest this based on the body language and facial expression, however, with the new dialogue, it makes less sense, though at some parts, the Ron Burgundy dialogue actually fits.

To create this film, I used http://en.savefrom.net/ to pull down the YouTube videos, one in MP4 form (Lock, Stock, and two smoking barrels) and another in Audio MP4 form (Ron Burgundy) since I was only planning to dub the audio into the video.  I could have use VideoPad Video Editor to extract the audio, however, I chose this approach instead.  Next, I want through the entire Ron Burgundy Audio clip and split it into segments for each phrase used in the YouTube clip.  I detached the audio from the Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels clip so that I could still use some of the original clip sounds (music, footsteps, glass setting on a table, etc).  All together, the audio dubs over fairly decently.  The darkness in the video clip make the mouth movements less distinct, which allows more flexibility around the mouth shape and the actual words being dubbed over.  With other videos, the character’s mouth movement was prominent, that some words wouldn’t fit the motion of the mouth on the screen.