For my first assignment this week, I decided to Return to the Silent Era. I kept this up with the class theme by having my movie scene be from the Spy Movie Kingsman… Do you sense the trend I am going on here? literally, everything I do is on Kingsman. I’ll eventually stop but today’s not the day. This probably has something to do with my Agent. She gets most of her inspiration from Agent Harry Hart. What a cool guy.

The assignment was to do it on a trailer, but I decided to use the bar fight scene instead because
A) The trailer had too much dialogue
B) The fight scene looked way better in black and white

To make the title cards, I googled a title card image and used canva to add the text. I used a font that seemed kind of oldish cursive but I could not get the color right, so I stuck with white.

I used windows movie maker and split the scenes where I needed to add the title card, and muted the entire thing. The bar scene had a soundtrack playing in the background, and I decided to keep that because it was such good music and I feel like if I picked any other song, I wouldn’t do the scene justice.
Because of the dialogue cards that were added, It messed up the music just a tad smidge so I had to play around with when it started so that the music ended at the perfect with the last blow the spy used.

Check out my final product! This assignment was rated 4 1/2 stars.

????½

So I saw this assignment and knew I had to try doing it. Unfortunately, Movie Maker isn’t the best at making this appear silent movie-y, but I tried my best. I went onto YouTube and looked around for random scenes from movies that I could possibly use. I ended up finding this one from Shrek:

It seemed perfect for this assignment. There’s some dialogue and some running away, the two staples of silent movies. I downloaded the scene and threw it into Movie Maker. Whenever there was some dialogue and then the shot changed, I inserted a title card to show the dialogue. I wanted to try using some actual title cards off the internet, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to insert them into Movie Maker. Instead, I just used an old timey font (Poor Richard to be specific), and hoped for the best.

I was able to use Movie Maker to make the whole scene in black and white, though I wasn’t able to add a filter that made it look like it was on some old film, which was disappointing. If I were to redo this, I’d want to figure out how I could add that in, since the grainy effect would do a lot for the final product. I also sped up the scene a bit, since it always seems like the action in silent movies is a bit faster than in real life. Lastly, I listened around on YouTube for some good silent movie music. I ended up finding one that I think fits the scene pretty well. I considered using several pieces of music, but I felt like that’d be a bit much for a scene that only clocks in at about 4 minutes.

Here’s the final product!

I was intrigued by the idea of aging a movie trailer to make it appear to be from the silent era.  It essentially admits that silent films are a separate art in and of themselves, with unique pros and cons (while of course also providing the opportunity for a humorous editing project).  As such I immediately began to rack my brain for recent movie trailers… Then I hit upon the new trailer for Wonder Woman.  Not only is it a beautiful example of a modern movie trailer, but the setting of the film is WWI.  I could essentially edit the trailer to match the time-period of the film itself!  As such, I realized that it would be the perfect candidate to return to the silent era.

This video assignment posed a unique challenge, in that I have a great deal of experience with editing video, but haven’t had much need to use effects.  So I began playing around with different options in the effect room of Cyberlink PowerDirector (my video-editing software), and found an effect called “Old Movie” that seemed to fit my needs.  However, I adjusted the background color, as the original seemed to filter with a strange sort of mustard yellow that just seemed odd.  I also realized that my video still seemed too smooth.  It now was black and white with aged lines, but the actual playback wasn’t jumpy.  I ultimately decided to combat this by adjusting the playback speed.  I’ve actually been searching for a way to edit speed for a while now, and now had real motivation to properly investigate.  Combing through the designer options yielded nothing, nor the effects room.  I ultimately opted to try a Google search, and voila!  The answer turned out to be in the Power Tools section of my software.  I then sped up my footage to make it jerkier.

After adjusting the playback speed, I began to work with title cards (specifically this one), stretching my selected card to fully fit the 16:9 aspect ratio.  I opted to use subtitles to insert the dialogue.  This was a bit of a pain, as it was difficult to center the dialogue, and timeline adjustments usually meant adjusting the placement of all the following subtitles.  I also used Incompetech to select my silent film music, ultimately choosing a bouncier intro piece and a more dramatic distressed piece for the latter half of the trailer.  After making small adjustments here till the video met my satisfaction, I published the final product on YouTube.

The final product looks relatively well aged.  Personally, I most enjoy the mashup of WWI battle scenes with this silent film style.  The two mash together quite well, and helped affirm my trailer selection.