For my first project this week, I chose to create an intro to a movie about my superhero Khatyrka. As some of you might recall, I created a poster for the movie a few weeks back. 

 I’ve now constructed the first scenes of the movie with opening credits. 

I began with the vision of showcasing the Russian Siberian mountains where Khatyrka’s story originates. I was partially inspired by other DS106 students who used landscape imaginary to begin their title sequences. However, I realized quite quickly that I did not want to have a voice-over explaining the story. I wanted a more organic and modern introduction to the movie. 

I thought I could open with the landscape and cut to a little girl laying on the ground in the mountains staring at the night night sky. this image proved very difficult to find, but lead me to some stock videos of a woman falling back on grass in slow motion. I decided to change the scene to a dream like sequence where we see Khatyrka in a park falling into a trance like flashback. 

My next obstacle was the stock video itself. I did not want to pay for the video and did not want the watermark on my final project, so I decided to search you tube for a similar image. This again proved unfruitful. At this point, my direction changed again to search for a woman sleeping and waking. I by chance stumbled upon a video clip from the show NCIS of a character having a PTSD nightmare. The character matched Khatyrka’s description, and the scene captured the idea that Khatyrka has a past even she is unsure of. 

Once the creative vision was in place, the technical work began. I downloaded the NCIS video as well as two scenic videos from YouTube using Y2mate and then converted the MP4 files to AVI files using Online-Convert. I selected haunting musical sounds from FreeSound, and import all the files to Windows Movie Maker. Once imported, the files were sliced, cropped, and layered to create the a (relatively) seamless video and audio. Finally, I added the opening credits and aligned them with the tone and start of the audio. At this point, I did realize however that the latest version (2012?) of Windows Movie Maker is no longer available for download. I was working with the 2.6 version which was much more limiting than the tutorials I found for the latest version. For instance, I really wanted to move the credits information to the bottom of the screen, but the system appears to only allow centering the title cards. 

In the end, I am pleased with the results, especially given the technology and very pleased with my new found ability to mute segments of sound within the audio portion of the video. 

This assignment was to create an intro that could be used for the beginning of a movie. You had to create an intro for any sort of movie that was around 1 minute to 1 minute and 30 seconds long, then narrate the beginning of the movie.

Since it was required that we have 10 stars worth of assignments related to our created character, I thought this assignment would be a great opportunity for stars for my character because of it being worth 4 and a half stars. So my objective was to find a video with a western theme and relate the narration to my character.

To complete this assignment I searched Youtube until I found a Planet Earth video that just showed beautiful views of desert settings. Then I transferred the video to iMovie and trimmed the video to be around 1 minute and 23 seconds. While searching for a perfect video of the western setting I came across background music on one of the videos that I felt would match better with the setting of the video I would use. So using Mp3ify, I found the video on Youtube with the background music of Gramatik by Brave Men and converted the video’s audio into a MP3 on my computer. After converting the audio to an MP3 I imported the music into iMovie and trimmed the song to match the video.

As for the narration, I figured that most movie intros only have the title narrated before the movie begins. I didn’t want the narration to take away from the beautiful desert backgrounds in the video. Also, since my character is sort of a mysterious character; I wanted to keep the mystery alive to begin the movie. To narrate the intro, I placed a title slide at the end of the video that said “The Unexpected” because it relates to the nickname for the created character of Buck Smith. After finishing the creation of the intro video I uploaded it to Youtube.

Overall, this was a pretty interesting assignment that I felt that I could have done more if I didn’t feel the pressure of doing so many video assignments throughout the week. But enough of my talking, here is the intro.

Movie intro 5 stars

As the war began many died, both sides took heavy losses, no other kingdom dared interfere or make a move. All feared the might of these two great kingdoms, but no one could foresee the outcome. Throughout the years many battles took place, but none of those compared to that which took place at The Valley of Kurgosthan. Days and days of just soldiers colliding, until a peasant turned soldier tool command of his troops and for two straight days waded through the forest on the outskirts of the battle. On the third day  the exhausted troops arrived behind the enemy lines, all of them were dressed as the enemy, armor and swords were picked up from the corpses of the enemy’s scouts. In groups of three they split  up to look for the enemy commander. Their orders… to kill, after a three year war,the enemy was destroyed from within, a lone company of soldiers disguised as the enemy infiltrated the commanders tent and won the battle for their kingdom. Only four people made it back alive, those four were awarded the highest honor of knighthood and to this day have their names and their troops names carved in the pages of time.

I found a bunch of different army charging, clips from various movies, then clipped them together and added a bit of music all using VideoPad. Once that was done I brainstormed what I wanted the intro to sound like. After practicing to make sure I wouldn’t mess it up when recording I recorded the real thing. It went perfectly, I added the track to the clip I had made before. I then deleted the sound from the movies, replaced it with the battle music and lowered the sound of it so my narration could be heard and understood. At which point I added the narration I had just done and put into the video so that it ended right before the clips finished. Now because the song wasn’t going its full length I didn’t want it to end abruptly so I added a fade out effect which gave the illusion of the song ending.