This assignment was called “Highlight Reels”, you were supposed to take an athlete and create a highlight tape for them! So the athlete I chose to you was the one and only James Baylor, MYSELF! I used the highlights from my last season and mashed them all up together using windows movie maker, I got to add a picture and description of myself for the intro and threw a little mix tape instrumental I got from YouTube. I just used converted the file into a mp3 format and inserted it into the background. I had to lower the volume a little bit because at first it was a bit over bearing. Hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did making it!
The second assignment I did was worth 5 stars called Highlight Reels. And at this point I am very frustrated with video. I like the topics and all I just can’t find a good editing tool, my computer keeps freezing, and anything that can go wrong is. However I am being very careful about saving my work every now and then to prevent loosing it. *saves draft* I began by finding several videos and using a converter to download them. Most of the videos were unable to download, my best assumption is because hey were protected. SO I had very limited choices in videos. I then edited them and cropped and rearranged. I decided to add a title and that’s when things went wrong.
I had all of my clips picked out and I was adding a title to it. And then this happened.. Luckily after shutting down the program it saved on it’s own. And so the first thing I did was officially save my work. And then it happened again!!!
Luckily again it auto saved, but it was still very very annoying. I wanted to put a background song in but in order to edited it I had to use Audacity. Yay! I really have missed Audacity.
I cropped the song and then made it fade out. Then I exported it and put it into the video editing app. I then had to change the length in Audacity again cause it was too long and repeat the process. And then Movavi stopped working once again and once again I had to close the program and then restore my work. I added a finishing title, which is done through the program and then I export my video and this time it’s the correct length so yay! Now I’m thinking about going back and trying to figure out the difference between the two projects and why the first video assignment I did was so long.
The editing software has a lot of cool features including different fades, titles, and effects. However, you cant edit sound in it which is a huge downfall. Although I liked the software I do not think this is the best one out there to use.
I think the choice of music was awesome! It lined up perfectly with the intro and the first hit of the video and it correlated with the video really really well without much tweaking.
For this assignment, we had to find an athlete that we like and make a highlight reel of them, along with adding music and an intro. The following video is of Tyrod Taylor, who was a Virginia Tech quarterback, before being drafted to play for the Baltimore Ravens. He did not see much playing time there however, and is now with the Buffalo Bills. The video is set to Enter Sandman by Metallica, which is the song that is played during Virginia Tech games.
To complete this assignment, I first found the clips I wanted to use on YouTube. I then used a Youtube-to-Mp4 converter so that I could open the clips in iMovie. I then found the song and went through the same process. Once in iMovie, I edited the clips together, added the introduction, and edited the music to fit with the clips. I then saved everything, and began the process of uploading it to WordPress. This took over an hour to do, and I was a bit worried it would not work, but eventually everything came together.
This week we are doing assignments from the Video Assignment category. I chose this one which was to create a video highlight reel for your favorite sports player. I like baseball and the Washington Nationals player, Bryce Harper is certainly interesting to watch. I took some clips I found online on Google Images and using Microsoft Live Movie Maker I pieced together a highlight reel of Bryce in all his glory. I added music from incompetech.com where you can get free music downloads. I chose Motherlode by Kevin MacLeod because it provided a sound that emulates confidence and conviction. I love how this turned out the music and images are a perfect combination and made a great little highlight reel. Finally, I then titled my movie “Natitude” since this is the slogan adopted by the team ever since the confident teenage Bryce Harper stepped up to the Washington Nationals plate!
Description of Video Assignment: “Channel your inner ESPN and clip together highlights of your favorite athlete, set it to some music, and add an intro.”
The Story
Blake Griffin is one of my favorite NBA players. He plays for the Los Angeles Clippers but I first became a fan of his when he was in college at Oklahoma University. He was such a great college player. His dunking ability was as good back then as it is now. I remember one game in college he jump so high while dunking it he hit his head against the backboard and got a black eye. But, all the highlights I chose to do of him are NBA highlights because I feel he’s dunking the same way as he always has now he’s doing it against better players.
The Process, Narrated
To create this assignment I had to first download Clipgrab which allowed me to save videos off Youtube onto my computer. Once I saved all the videos I wanted to use I starting to trim the videos using Quicktime on my mac. I would trim the video and save it on my desktop. When I had all my trim clips I then used iMovie on my mac to put all the clips together into one video. I used powerpoint to create the beginning intro and uploaded it to the video in the intro section. The last thing I added to the video was the background music from my iTunes. iMovie made it easy to insert the video, introduction, and the music because it had a preset slot for everything.
Then I uploaded the video to Youtube and embedded it into my blog post.
For this week part of our class assignment was to complete two ds106 video assignments from the assignment bank. For my first assignment, worth five stars, I chose to create a highlight real.
The instructions for this project requests that the creator, “Channel your inner ESPN and clip together highlights of your favorite athlete, set it to some music, and add an intro”. I’m not sure that I have a favorite athlete, so I just picked a well known one.
I chose to do my highlight real of Barry Sanders, well because who doesn’t know who Barry Sanders is….. If you don’t you are either to young to remember, or have lived under a rock your entire life.
Barry Sanders
Sanders is a former NFL running back who spent his entire professional career with the Detroit Lions. He is a member of both the college and professional football halls of fame, he was ranked by NFL Top 10 as the most elusive runner in NFL history, and also topped their list of greatest players never to reach the Super Bowl. Throughout his professional career Sanders gained 15,269 rushing yards, 2,921 receiving yards, and 109 touchdowns. He retired within striking distance of Walter Payton’s career rushing mark of 16,726 yards. Only Payton and Emmitt Smith have rushed for more yards than Sanders.
How I created this project:
Step 1. Choose an athlete
Step 2. Went to YouTube, viewed some sports highlights and then downloaded my favorites.
Step 3. I imported the videos to iMovie.
Step 4. Then I cut and trimmed the video to small clips that I enjoyed watching. By highlighting them and dragging them to the project area. At this point I played around with some other editing techniques by changing some of the filters and colorings of this clips to make black and white, or look old school.
Step 5. I then looked up stats and added them to my video.
Step 6. After I was done cutting and trimming I added the opening and credits to the video.
Step 7. The video needed audio to make it complete so I went to my iTunes and click and dragged it to the project area and dropped it to add the music.
Step 8. I then exported the video to my iTunes .
Step 9. After I finalized the video I uploaded it my it to my YouTube channel.
Step 10:For the final step I embedded the video I just created into this blog by highlighting the web link from YouTube and pasted it into the add media tab.
Description of Assignment: Channel your inner ESPN and clip together highlights of your favorite athlete, set some music, and add an intro.
In order to create this assignment I used Quick Time and iMovie which already come previously downloaded to Macs. I got all of my videos from Youtube.
First after finding all of my videos, I had to upload them to Clipgrab in order to put them into Quick Time.
Once they were uploaded to Clipgrab I was able to save them to my desktop and drag them into Quick Time.
Once all of my videos were in Quick Time I was able to trim them. You simply just move the yellow box either in or out until you have selected what you want to be trimmed or in the video.
Once all the trimming was complete I put my video into iMovie and added a song by downloading it from an MP3 and saving it to my desktop then inserted it into iMovie.
I also was able to add an intro to my video through iMovie. They had a bunch of intro slides, if you would, to choose from and then you just insert your own text.
And that was it! Here is my highlight reel I created..
I chose this Video Assignment because it kind of fed off my other Video Assignment I created. I said then that my second favorite sport was football. So now, I chose to create an entire video of my favorite football player RGIII.
I love RIII. I think that he seems to be not only a great athlete but also a great person on and off the field. I chose a few of my favorite plays that he has made during his time in the NFL and put them all into one video. I tried to choose a few different kinds of plays to put in the video as long as they were good ones. I believe this video all together shows the success that RGIII has had in the NFL even though some people think that he has really not been as special as they thought he would be. I chose the song “All I Do is Win” because I thought it was appropriate and fitting for a video on an athlete and their plays.
This Video Assignment is related to the concept of digital storytelling. This is because it is a video that tells a story of RGIII.s success in plays he has made. It could also tell a story of RGIII’s time in the NFL.
I’m working with Windows Movie Maker. It took me a while to figure out the editing tool because stupidly I was reading it as if what I clipped was removed and of course its what is between the in and out points that remains. Because of that I have to reload the video each time I want to add a shot, but thats not too much trouble. My first thought in trying to remake the Chaplin video was that my favorite part of the video was Chaplin himself – his face and his actions. The only other thing in the shots with him at that time was the iron bars, which obviously reminded me of prison. So I figured it would be funny to give him something -else- to react to while behind bars and that made me think of interspersing film clips with the Chaplin video. I downloaded several prison scenes from famous movies including Silence of the Lambs, Grand Budapest Hotel, Stir Crazy, Ghostbusters and Shawshank Redemption. I didn’t do a ton of searching and scrapping stuff – I kind of let the scenes that I found dictate how I would create the movie. It took me a few hours to get comfortable with the tools (as explained above), but once I did, it was really no problem at all. I learned how to bring in music where I want it and how to select the point in the track where I want to begin by using in and out points. The only downside (which isnt much) about interspersing scenes with the Chaplin video is that every time you want to more more Chaplin in you have to download the whole video again because once you trim it just one piece, the rest is gone. I used the free music from incompetech- three songs, the first is the elevator music track called Local Forecast, then a funk thing called Your Call and I ended with a classical song called Danse Macabre. I thought about leaving some of the music track under the movie clips, but I liked the stark cuts better – thought it had more punch. YouTube was the source for all of the film clips – I simply looked up prison scenes (remembering the ones from Silence of the Lambs and Shawshank Redemption). The Movie Maker’s tool to add a title page and captions are very very simple and self-explanatory. Adding the music took a little while to figure out, because its actually a two-fold process – identifying where you want the music to come in and identifying what part of the music you want played. Once I figured that out, I was essentially done. I actually had to go back and reopen the finished project when I realized I hadn’t added any of the Chaplin sound. I figured out that only some tracks are downloadable from Soundcloud but luckily one of the tracks where the woman speaks was downloadable. I used that tiny piece of sound and stuck it in.
For one five star project, I decided to do a mystery story. I got my entire family involved and my kids were particularly into it, getting dressed up and helping me name the characters. I sketched out a shot list that helped me determine what order I ended up shooting in. I tried to shoot by staying on one side of the 180 degree line (also realized that by moving behind the actors that it gave me some easy points to use in editing – like when I was right behind someone and then wanted to cut to them speaking). One thing I realized was that I should have used by phone side to side instead of up and down and it would have given me a wider picture but oh well. Look for the cameo from my cat.
I also did a five star assignment called Highlight Reel – I used my favorite athlete, Mariano Rivera. Tehre were plenty of highlight reels already built on YouTube but I built me own – only using them for sources, not entire consequences. I enjoyed this and it wasn’t difficult. I am getting used to being able to download and move clips around easily, along with trying to manipulate sound by figuring out where I want it to start and end and also using fades.
My last assignment was a two star assignment called Capture the Beauty. The idea was to shoot a 6 second video with Vine which I did – showing the beautiful white tree in my front yard. The hardest part of this assignment was trying to figure out Vine. I signed up and shot multiple videos but couldnt figure out how to post or share them. Finally I ended up shooting it on my camera and then allowing Vine to take a video from the camera and I uploaded it and =then= was able to share it.
This has been my favorite unit so far and the skills I’m learning here I am already thinking about using for future projects once this class is over. The editing is so simple and so flexible and looks so clean, I can see a lot of possibilities. The process has made me more comfortable with the process of downloading and using files and trying different tools to see what works and what doesn’t. My wife (who is by training an Avid editor) wants me to teach the tools to her.
POSSIBLE DS106 PROJECT!!!!!!
A thought for a possible DS106 video assignment is called Car Chase! The assignment is to use existing movie footage and reconstruct a car chase from beginning to end – for example, start with Frank Drebin telling the driver to follow that car, then build your car chase until it comes to some sort of an end. Bonus points for unusual music – make sure to add a title page that sets up the chase.
For this assignment (worth 5 stars), I made a highlight reel of Odell Beckham Jr., my (Ami speaking) favorite football player. I found clips online and compiled them into a video, finally adding Power by Kanye West as the music.
The Giants are my team. I don’t indulge in things like organized sports often, but when I do, it’s because of Odell. There’s always room to praise the most talented and spirited wide receiver in the NFL. Kanye is a perfect parallel as they both excel in their respective fields.
