VideoAssignments1246 – Assignment Bank

Darcy’s Squeaky Proposal

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The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is beloved by all. It’s sometimes credited as the beginning of the cult-ish nature of Jane Austen works. And, of course, it has a lovely, completely unnecessary scene of Colin Firth in a wet shirt.

Really, though, this adaptation is really great. To be honest, despite being an English major, I hadn’t read or watched any Austen until a year ago. Heck, I haven’t read most “classics”. I’m just about to start Animal Farm and I’m just happy we’re doing an exigency reading and not a historical reading of it, because I’ve never studied it before. Anyway, Austen.

For the Chipmunk Style assignment (3.5 stars), I decided to take this iconic scene from the 6-hour series and alter it. But, I also wanted to take some creative liberties with it because, honestly, if BBC can add a wet Colin Firth for no reason, then I should be allowed to tweak the assignment a bit. I just wanted to have Darcy be high-pitched and chipmunk-y. It’s a lot more fun that way, as well as adding a bit of a challenge to the assignment.

I also chose the proposal scene because it’s such a serious moment, when these two characters are opening up to each other. It’s so dramatic, there isn’t any background music, it’s just their raw emotions. And there’s a fair amount of Darcy talking, as well as Elizabeth. And I just like the way Darcy stomps around the room like an anxiety-ridden child.

Process:

First I found the clip on Youtube, and used Clip Converter to download both the .MP4 and the .MP3 file.

I opened the .MP4 into Windows Movie Maker, and the .MP3 into Audacity.

In Audacity, I listened through the audio, selecting only Darcy’s parts and changing the pitch to something that sounded comedic, but didn’t get too distorted.

Then I saved it and put it into Windows Movie Maker like I have in previous assignments, lined it up with the clip, and added the title and credits. Pretty simple!

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Chipmunk Style: Mia’s Fast Makeover

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Chipmunk Style: Helium may be in short supply, but a little digital tweaking can still leave your favorite actors sounding like the Chipmunks. Take a clip from a film and either speed up the action or raise the pitch on the audio track for some high-pitched laughs. (3.5 stars).

For this assignment, I found a YouTube clip from the movie, Princess Diaries. I love this movie, it’s a classic! The clip is when Mia, the soon-to-be princess, gets a princess makeover. I thought this would be funny to speed up. I converted the clip using a converter site, Fltvo, and turned it into a mp4 file so I could easily insert it into my iMovie. Once it downloaded, I did just that.

I had a little bit of help from Apple Support, which helped me figure out how to slow and speed up video and audio using iMovie. I realized it was so simple to change anything regarding to the audio or video, you just have to double-click and the toolbar pops up above the video screen. There is a button that is in a shape of a turtle. I clicked that, and then it shows Speed. I clicked on the arrow, and then hit “Fast”, in order to speed up my video! You can also slow it down and customize the speed to your liking!

This assignment reminds me of any girl’s makeover or any girl’s process of getting ready. Most girls want to look perfect, or like princesses, and we take FOREVER to get ready in the morning. For me, this getting ready time has definitely decreased since middle school, but sometimes, I still wish the process took a little less time and I could speed it up, like the video I created! Mia’s makeover was a long process, but I did manage to make it seem faster with their movements and their funny and new chipmunk voices!

I enjoyed this assignment because I do like this movie and I like finding new things to try, like the Speed tool.

—SALTY SKINN

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The Dark Knight Chipmunk Style

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Assignment (3 stars)

For this assignment, we had to take a clip from a film and edit the audio in some way. I chose to edit a scene from the Dark Knight, as this is Edward Creeper’s favorite movie of all time. This scene is pretty classic, so I would assume most people have at least some recollection of what is going on. It is interesting to hear how everything sounds so much more different now, and how less threatening the Joker comes across.

To complete this assignment, I first found the clip I wanted to edit from YouTube (found here). I then used Nora’s tutorial to help guide me through the process of editing. I opened the clip in Audacity after downloading it using a YouTube converter, and used it to change the pitch of the voices (I set it to 50%). I then saved the the clip as mp3 onto my desktop. I opened the original clip in iMovie, and turned off the sound. I then added the new audio file into iMovie, and overlaid it on top of the clips so it would flow together. I then saved everything, and began the process of uploading it to YouTube.

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Squeek Rod

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In a world filled with adventure and stunts one man and his crew rise above the rest, Hot Rod. However during his training something terrible happened to Rod’s voice, he became unable to say whiskey correctly! This coupled with the chipmunk squeaky style voice creates for some wonderful comedy. Enjoy!

This is a 3 star video assignment for Ds106 titled Chipmunk Style. It was created by downloading the youtube clip from the movie Hot Rod and then tweaking the audio in imovie to create the chipmunk style voices in the video.

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Alvin & The Starship Enterprise

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For 3 stars this week, I completed the Chipmunk Style assignment.

Helium may be in short supply, but a little digital tweaking can still leave your favorite actors sounding like the Chipmunks. Take a clip from a film and either speed up the action or raise the pitch on the audio track for some high-pitched laughs.

I didn’t really know where to start, but I thought it would be funny if the characters had really deep voices in the original or it was an intense moment. I thought Star Trek might be funny, so I just searched on YouTube for a clip, but ended up choosing the trailer instead of an actual clip.

For this particular assignment, I used a Mac on campus, because I know that you can easily separate the audio from the video in iMovie. I’m not sure how easy that is in Movie Maker. I opened the video file (mp4) in Audacity and changed the pitch of the clip, and then exported the clip. Since I was easily able to separate the audio from the video in iMovie, I removed the original audio and inserted my edited clip. Since I didn’t change anything but the pitch, the length of the audio was still the same as the original, so the audio and video lined up perfectly! I really enjoyed completing this assignment, and it’s funny to watch the final product.. Enjoy!

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I feel badly.

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This assignment was the Chipmunk Style. As the title may imply, I had to take a video clip and edit it by speeding it up or raising the pitch to make a scene found like chipmunks. For this, I used Windows Movie Maker’s editing tool to speed up the audio to 2x speed.

I picked this video because it’s a very emotionally charged moment from one of my favorite video games series: Metal Gear Solid. I titled this post the way I did because it feels like I’m trampling on something feelsy, haha.

Regardless, I like the way this turned out!

This assignment was worth 3 stars.

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“Hello, Clarice.”

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One of my favorite movies is Silence of the Lambs. It was my first introduction to the very talented and dapper Anthony Hopkins (Meet Joe Black will forever make me cry) and is an excellent thriller. Hopkins is also one of my mom’s favorite actors, and we watch movies of his together quite frequently–therefore, more good memories and associations with his work despite the at times darker tones and themes.

Initially, when I was planning the Chipmunk-ify a scene assignment, I wanted to do the opening from 1997’s Romeo + Juliet (Leonardo DiCaprio FOREVER). I made this decision, because I texted my friend, a huge Shakespeare fan, asking her which scene from ANY movie I should alter. She immediately responded with: THE OPENING FROM ROMEO + JULIET. We then proceeded to text each other clips and quotes from the apparently faithful-but-still-hysterical script and movie.

Sadly, when I went back to find the ONE clip I was able to find of the opening (it was in Italian, even!), it had been removed due to copyright claims. I was bummed, but I quickly started brainstorming for a new movie. I didn’t want to do a comedy, because making that funny via Chipmunk voices would be too easy of a task. I wanted to do either a drama or a thriller.

I thought of famous movie scenes: The Godfather, Scarface, Titanic, etc. Then, I remembered: the one scene my mother both loves and hates to quote because it’s so crazy creepy and awesome at the same time: meeting Hannibal Lecter and “Hello, Clarice” from Silence of the Lambs.

Thankfully, the clip was available thanks to Fox UK on YouTube! I tried to poke around and find the “can you make the lambs stop screaming, Clarice?” scene–my personal favorite–but had no luck. I settled on the introduction to Lecter and set to work.

Again, thanks to this site, I was able to convert the YouTube video into mp4 format easily. I then input the file into iMovie and set about trying to alter the audio. Frustratingly, iMovie ’09, the version on my computer, doesn’t have advanced audio manipulation options, so I had to export the .aif file to Garageband and change the pitch in that program.

Trickier said than done–even with my Garageband experience, the .aif file arrived unable to be edited, and I had to browse the ever-trusty Mac forums to find my solution. After copying and fiddling with the sound, I had to carefully level the pitch alteration. Because of the low quality of the ripped audio, too much of an alteration muddled the speech so that the viewer couldn’t understand what was being said, and too little alteration to clear the speech hardly made a difference. Finally, I found a middle ground, saved the file, re-loaded it into iMovie, inserted it back into the video–the perfect timing remained, thank goodness!–and added credits.

Personally, I think chipmunk Hannibal Lecter is far less scary than normal Lecter, but I still wouldn’t accept a dinner invitation from him or Felix Yusupov.

PS: No, I haven’t read the novel. Is it any good?

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Chipmunk Style: Walter and Jesse’s Ebola Argument

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For the Chipmunk Style video assignment, I decided to use a scene from the television show Breaking Bad. In this particular scene, Jesse (the young man) is angry with Walter (the older, bald gentleman) for causing him to panic over something as seemingly insignificant as a fly. Jesse tells Walter that he thought that the contaminate was something like Ebola, rather than a fly. The fact that this television series referenced Ebola over 4 years before it became a global security concern is interesting to me, and is main reason why I wanted to make this video. I also wanted to see how Walter and Jesse would sound chipmunk’d!

To start off, I downloaded the clip using Savefrom.net from this Youtube video (The clip is not censored):

With the clip downloaded, I imported it into Movie Maker. Once the clip was in Movie Maker, I saved the audio from the clip as a standalone mp3.

I took the sound file from the movie and imported it into Audacity. I raised the pitch to create a “chipmunk” effect for the voices.

Now that the voices were high-pitched, I exported the sound file and placed it back into Movie Maker. I muted the audio on the original clip so that only the chipmunk version could be heard.

Finally, I exported and uploaded the finished video to Youtube.

This video assignment was worth:

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Chipmunk Style (The Other Guys)

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Original Assignment (2.5 stars)

For this assignment, we we asked to find a funny clip from a film and pitch up the audio, making the actors sound like chipmunks. There were so many clips I could have used, but ended up going with the whisper fight scene from the film, “The Other Guys“. The movie itself was not great, and the comedy was mediocre at best. This particular scene was recommended to me by Youtube, and once I watched it again, I thought it would be more more funny with the voices pitched up.

Once again, KeepVid has been my main tool to download video to MP4 format. I uploaded the file to iMovie and began applying my normal edits (fades, transitions). This time around, I only used one transition to introduce the scene. There was not much editing to be done with this assignment, so it was complete in under 15 minutes. My final step was to select the audio from the clip and pitch it up a couple notches. Under audio effects, iMovie gives you the option to pitch up the audio from 1-4. I chose number 3 because it sounded as close to the chipmunks (4 was too much).

Audio Effects in iMovie.

This was probably the easiest video assignment I have completed thus far. But I did not pick it for that particular reason, I chose it because I have never performed this task in imovie before, and I wanted to learn and have a little laugh in the process. Check out the final video below and have a laugh or two.

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Chipmunks of the Dead

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After going through a few of the video assignments and weighing the difficulty levels and my inexperience, I decided it would be best to ease into these assignments. So, I started off by recreating a funny movie scene in the style of chipmunks. I personally can not stand the chipmunk sound but I think with the proper scene and content it can turn out funny.

I chose a scene from a great parody movie called Shaun of the Dead. In the scene Shaun and his friend come out of the pub singing the night away. However, little known to them, zombies are taking over. So naturally, they start to sing even louder! I think this scene was quite funny to begin with so adding in the chipmunk tone fit in naturally.

In order to complete this assignment, I found the clip on Youtube and downloaded it using KeepVid to store it as an MP4. I then used an audio software device called WavePad which has a variety of audio options in which to edit the track. After uploading the clip to WavePad I used the Pitch Change Tool and set it to 190. This gave the desired chipmunk effect. I then saved it as a .wav and uploaded both the video and new audio track into Windows Movie Maker. I combined the two and then simply uploaded it to Youtube.

In the end, I think this was a good stepping stone into the video assignments and I learned a few things about audio editing along the way. These should come in handy as I get deeper into the assignments. *** 2.5 Stars ***