There are all sorts of memorable characters within the different universes that shows and films create, making this assignment particularly difficult to lock into. Recently, I’ve been enjoying Daredevil, so I was originally going in that direction, but with a bit more thought I realized I wanted to do a hilarious character from a show that takes itself less seriously. This had me thinking about characters like Michael, Dwight and Jim from The Office. I also tossed around the idea of doing other characters from How I Met Your Mother, but I finally landed on Barney Stinson because he is simultaneously such a unique character while also fitting countless stereotypes constantly.
I certainly had a difficult time picking clips for this video. I already ended up with a video longer than what was recommended by the assignment, but I could have added hours worth of clips because they are so many that show Barney’s hilarity and fondness of his friends. Realistically, though, the most difficult thing was finding high quality clips to use to make the video as crisp as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any that were very high quality, but I searched and searched the web until I found the highest quality I could, meaning it won’t look like a blockbuster movie but it also won’t look like a Minecraft slideshow. Other than that, editing took a bit as I’m still learning how to efficiently edit, but making this was mostly a very enjoyable experience.
When you hear the word “honor,” what person or character comes to mind? For me, it’s Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, my childhood show. For some reason, I’ve been going down memory lane a lot lately. As I was looking for another video assignment to do, I went along with Character Description (originally 3 stars, personal effort at 5 stars). However, I wanted to add my own little twist to it.
Have you watched “Learn the Alphabet with _______” videos? That’s where I got the idea to modify this character description assignment. Since Zuko has a lot of iconic lines, I thought that I would use each letter in the alphabet to present as many Zuko lines as possible. In this way, I can present Zako’s character from a unique and unconventional perspective. That said, it turned out to be more tedious than I expected.
My first challenge was finding quotes for each letter, and I eventually had to get a little creative (especially for the letters “v” and “x”). I first searched Zuko videos and went through dozens to find the specific quote I wanted or to listen for anything I could play around with. Some quotes I wanted to use I could not find videos. Even though I have the full DVD set, I did not want to download them onto my laptop because of the lack of storage in my laptop. Of course, I plan on binge watching the show now that I went through all this effort of browsing through videos. But that’s besides the point.
I downloaded a number of videos and trimmed them to get the exact words and phrases I needed, and put them all together. To add on to the silliness of the video, I made the automated speech voice say things like “A is for… B is for…” At the end, I added one of those childhood trap remixes.
Looking at this video again, it’s one of those things you create where you say jokingly, “Wow I hate myself.” Honestly, this is such a gag video, it’s garbage, but I had so much fun with it.
Getting to know the joker I found clips from “The Dark Night” on youtube and downloaded them. Once I did that I put them in order so the story makes some sense. I got the Jokers stories that he tells people in order.
Musicless Music Video It took me a while to find a video that I was able to download. iMovie has a lot of sound effects in the library already so I used those. I thought it would be funny to use a sound effect after that scene happens, it makes no sense but it was fun to do.
Why So Serious? When I was younger I was a big fan of Indiana Jones and Ace Ventura. One of the movies is somewhat serious and the other is comedy. This was pretty challenging trying to match up the mouths and the words. I cut the clip down a lot to make it seem like it was somewhat accurate.
Lando is introduced in The Empire Strikes back as an administrator of cloud city. Upon meeting him he comes off as a manipulative type individual who was formerly friends with Han. Once the visitors find out that he had been held hostage by the empire his entire narrative is switched around. Skipping to Return of the Jedi, Lando is one of the few rebels who sneak into the palace and try to free Han. Towards the end of the movie you can see how much of his dedication was switched to the rebellion cause. I don’t think the writers intended his character to feel in debt to Han for being frozen in carbonite, I believe the experience gave him a new purpose for the rest of the films.
When I saw the Character Description Assignment (3 stars), I knew I wanted to do it because I wanted to work with my favorite character from my favorite movie, Susan Cooper from Spy!! Last week, I did my Video Essay for a scene fromĀ Spy, but this week, I got to create a video dedicated to introducing people to my favorite character from Spy, Susan Cooper!!
To create this video, I used the clip I downloaded for my Video Essay, and I downloaded clips on YouTube for Scenes 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6Ā in the video using the 4K Video Downloader tool. I uploaded the clips to iMovie one by one and edited them to get the one or two parts I wanted from each clip for the video.
In this video, I wanted to show Susan Cooper’s progression as a character from a timid computer agent to her attempts to be a field agent, with very few people believing in her, to an incredible field agent and fighter. She has to constantly fight people’s expectations of her and believe in herself. We even get to see her give herself a pep talk while out in the field in the video! She becomes more confident and skilled as this video and the movie progress.
Once I liked the various scenes I cut together, and I liked how the video flowed, I added a title to the beginning scene and then credits at the end. I credited the YouTube accounts that I got the videos from, as well as naming myself as the director of this video. At the end, I went through to make sure the volume was consistent throughout and to make adjustments. Once I liked the video, I saved it as a file on my computer and uploaded it to YouTube!
This is my video on my agent profile Alex Bercek.Ā Alex is a 22 year old, 5’11”, athletic CIA agent.Ā She has brown skin and was born in Italy where she lived for 7 years before coming to live in the states, where she now resides in Washingtion, DC.Ā Her personality is light and fun even under her jobs circumstances, she enjoys traveling and working on motorcycles, including her own.Ā She has a lot of respect for her family and her sister is her bestfriend.
This assignment is usually for a movie character I believe, but I took the opportunity to use my agent instead.Ā In order to make this I used iMovie to put everything together.Ā But in terms of the pictures used I tried searching images by silhouette and making sure things were quite vague.Ā Because of course, Alex has to keep her identity a secret, but everything else is free game.Ā SO I took her character traits from the dosier account I made and made a few audio adjustments to fit it all. The background music is Die Another Day by Madonna just because I thought it fit well for some background noise.
Instead of doing a character description on a character from a movie, I decided to do my character, Agent Reveal. I used clips from movies to describe what I do through video. I thought this was a cool assignment and really allowed me to show who my character was through other movies.
I then went random and said whatever came to mind. This little Ewok has been in quite a few movies and I needed his dialogue to be all over the place to stay in character. I had a general idea of topics to hit but wanted things to be very loose. I imported all my video into PowerDirector. I added pictures to the background and used the Chroma key to remove all the green. PowerDirector was free so while not the best, it is serviceable.
I saved each scene as a WMV file and then imported them into Windows Movie Maker, also free!
I added some sound effects with the add music button. I also added the beginning and ending title boards by clicking on the credits button. Both sound and credits are under the home page. When done I clicked save as and used the YouTube option and uploaded my file to YouTube.
Create a short video – about one-and-a-half to two minutes long – that describes a character. Use about 3-5 short clips that describe the character’s personality, that portrays what they will be like in the story. Basically you are just taking a closer look at a character before you begin the story so the audience can get to know the characters better.
Make this fun, and interesting, create a story in your blog with this character.
This was, without a doubt, my favorite Video Assignment of the bunch, and while it does add another four-and-a-half stars to my total, I personally think it was worth the full five, if only because of the effort that went into this.
For starters, I went to the Kiss Anime website, and looked up episodes of Kimagure Orange Road to base my video on. Once I logged on, I was given permission to download whatever episodes I needed, for free, by right-clicking the respective “480×360.mp4” links, and saving my findings on my computer’s hard drive, proper titles and all. To give myself more of a challenge, I only stuck with the original anime series – all forty-eight episodes – that aired from 1987 to 1988. That meant I couldn’t use any of the OVA footage from 1989 to 1991, much less anything from the two full-length movies released to theaters in 1988 and 1996, respectively.
The character I chose to focus on is the male lead, Kyosuke Kasuga. Kyosuke’s the oldest child, and only son, in a single-parent family who has had to move to a new town seven times in his life prior to the start of the series. The reason why they move is rather simple, to the point that it’s revealed in the first chapter of the manga and the first episode of the anime: Every member of Kyosuke’s family – on his mother’s side, at least – is an “esper,” meaning they have the ability to teleport, use telekinesis, and use their minds to do various activities, depending on the situation they’re in.
Once my footage was uploaded, one by one, onto Windows Live Movie Maker, I had to wait several times over to cut the footage at the right time, not only to fit the time limit mentioned at the top of this post, but also to make sure I had enough material to tell a story with what I was able to get. By shear coincidence, the five clips I ultimately chose were all ordered by the release date of the episode they’re respectively found in: Kyosuke’s younger sister, Kurumi, sending him flying across the room with a cabinet was in Episode 1; the family conversation about Kyosuke’s indecisive nature was from Episode 25; Kyosuke’s daydream about his two friends, Hikaru Hiyama and Madoka Ayukawa, fighting it out for his affections was in Episode 32; Kyosuke using his esper abilities, known in series canon as “The Power,” to travel back to the morning before his classmates’ Christmas Eve party was in Episode 38; and the final sequence, where Kyosuke uses “The Power” to scare off a group of bullies harassing a younger Madoka and calling him an alien, was from Episode 47, the first half of the show’s two-part finale. The second half, Episode 48, was referenced in my “Five-Second Anime” tribute, when Kyosuke uses “The Power” to shatter a concrete wall that he was tied to.
The opening and closing credits – red lettering amongst a sky-blue background, was a minor nod to the second set of opening credits from the anime’s original run; this also provided a stronger case of continuity between the two projects, as I already used the first opening in my “Five-Second Anime.” The song that plays throughout the piece, however, has no connections to the franchise at all… well, almost no connections.
Its prompt rejection back then paved the way for the next series he conceived, āKimagure Orange Road,ā an instant success that came to be known as āthe Bible for Japanese teenagersā throughout the 1980s.
Between this, and the constant comparisons – in canon – between Kyosuke and Superman, I had to choose a song that summed up that revelation, en masse. Ultimately, I selected “Superstar,” the title track from Jesus Christ Superstar, to sum up the central gimmick for Kyosuke’s character development, in general, let alone the show as a whole: Although there might be someone among us with paranormal, and even god-like powers, this doesn’t change the fact that, to coin a fitting phrase, even immortals have mortal needs. While I did plan on having either Jay Laga’aia – Captain Typho from the Star Wars prequels – or Murray Head – the guy who went on to sing “One Night in Bangkok” for the Chess soundtrack – sing this one, I knew that there were no clips, involving either of them, that could be cut down to two minutes, at most. On the other hand, there were not one, not two, but eleven other people willing to perform it in their place: the finalists from ITV’s 2012 talent search, Superstar.
After finding a clip of the fourth episode of the mini-series, that tried to find someone to play the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s UK arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar, in which the newly-revealed finalists perform the title track of the musical, and the show, I uploaded the URL over to another website, SaveClipBro.com, which let me save the audio file in MP3 form. After that, I uploaded the file onto Audacity, cut out all but the necessary two minutes, saved everything, exported the audio as another MP3, uploaded that onto Windows Live Movie Maker to start the same time as my edited movie, save the combined product following some minor edits with the credits, uploaded everything onto my YouTube account, and completed my third official Assignment of this grading cycle.
As for the story this tells, the scenes I selected represent individual character traits attributed to Kyosuke over the course of the franchise: He’s always caught in the crossfire whenever something goes down involving his family or friends; he’s indecisive to the point of being obsessive-compulsive; he doesn’t want to see any of his friends or family members get hurt, physically or emotionally; he isn’t afraid to break the family rules to keep anyone and everyone he knows, including himself, out of harm’s way; and finally, when he does have to resort to using “The Power” to keep his loved ones out of trouble, odds are the end result’s going to serve as quite the shock to those in the vicinity.
When you put them together, though, that’s when you see the maturity of Kyosuke Kasuga, from boy to man, in the vein of those Charles Atlas ads you used to see in magazines decades ago. Early episodes and chapters exposed him as nothing outside of a scrawny weakling, despite having countless superhuman abilities in the family bloodline. His developing friendships, and subsequent love triangle with Hikaru and Madoka, combined with the wacky hijinks triggered by the rest of his mother’s side of the family, allowed him to increasingly gain confidence in his abilities. It isn’t too long before their lives are directly threatened, by which point Kyosuke is now able to save them all, to great effect, by using “The Power” for self-defense. Overall, this was an exciting day for me, and with only one-and-a-half stars to collect, and two Assignments left to earn them, I’m thinking that things are only going to get better.
Welcome friends and family to the Zombramony of LaNoir and Roary. You may remember La Noir from the Smooth & Spooky Radio Show. In this video you will meet La Noir and her soul mate, Roary.
This video was complied using Movie Maker, still pictures, an iPhone, and conversion software. Thank you Phantom for your expertise!
