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To make this video for the Return to the Silent Era assignment worth 5 stars I first found my trailer and downloaded it using the Firefox add-on Video DownloadHelper.
I imported the trailer of Moonrise Kingdom into a video editing software called Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is very similar to iMovie but it allows you to do much more with your video. I had never used Final Cut Pro before making this video, and so I click around and Google tips quite a bit, but overall it was a pretty straightforward piece of software to use.
In order to the make the video become silent, I separated the audio and video by right clicking on the trailer clip and selecting the “Expand Audio/Video.” Then I deleted the trailer audio and imported the music file from the Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack to serve as the music for the silent trailer. Next, I added in the title cards with some of the key lines of dialogue from the trailer and put them in the appropriate places within the trailer. I used the Blade tool to split the video file to make a spot for where the title cards could go. Then to make the trailer look old, I added some effects to the entire trailer. I added the Black and White and Aged Film effects, as well as the Crisp Contrast Effect to the video parts. Lastly, I realized that my music track was longer than the video, and that end of the song would fit nicely with the end of the video, so I trimmed down the beginning of the music and slid the entire file backwards to the beginning of the trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpCzz9hffcs&feature=youtu.be
For my take on the Return to the Silent Era assignment, I used a trailer for the movie Blue Jasmine.
I think the assignment was appropriate for this movie and the black and white effects and silent movie era music bode well for such a dark movie.
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.
I found the audio clip and the Mean Girls trailer on youtube and downloaded them onto my computer. I used keepvid to download Mean Girls into Mpeg Streamclip and then I exported it into iMovie.
The trickiest part was inserting the title cards. Because the trailer was in one clip and had to insert the photo into the clip and then delete it so that it would create a space for me to insert it again. When I first inserted the card and tried to play the trailer it would just freeze on the image right before the title and then skip to the image directly after. I have no idea why but deleting and reinserting worked perfectly!
See more trailers that have returned to the silent era here!!
Assignment Value: 5 Stars
Total Value for Week 4: 15 Stars
“The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue.”
Pre-production:
The challenges for this assignment was choosing a film in the cinematography world. There are so many good films but what would fit the culture of bowties & skulls. My girlfriend threw the idea of the first movie we ever saw together, Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson films have so much to offer as far as visual substance among other things.
Another challenge, was choosing the right music that would sync perfectly with Moonrise Kingdom. After searching for awhile on youtube. I found this video
and extracted the audio.
For the cards that show up every so often in silent films, I used this
Next, I would need to take the original movie trailer from youtube, seen here
Now that I had all my tools for pre-production, I was able to actually start my work
Production process:
Windows Movie Maker can be a frustrating tool, especially when it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you expect it too. I remember a few years back, there was an old film filter but they have taken that feature away in there new versions. Finding this out, I thought it would limit me from what I was trying to accomplish. I already started in a bad creative mind but I continued.
The process involved killing the audio from the original trailer file, a lot of choppin up the trailer, and adding in time cards where necessary to tell the narrative of the story. I also had to create a font color that would blend in nice with the sepia effect.
A great thing about Windows Media Player is that you can put it straight on your Youtube account without extracting and saving the file on your computer, streamlining the whole process. I loved that.
Well, here ya go!
Valued at 5 stars!
NPH and the Search for Color from bellekid on Vimeo.
I went to the doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me. Was it my mind or had all color drained from the world? Was I going crazy? Was I going blind? Was it my Trouser Weasel playing tricks on me?
I chose to do the Return To The Silent Era assignment, making the Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in Doctor’s Office episode of Neil’s Puppet Dreams into a black and white silent film.*****
I started by using KeepVid to download the clip as well as Dama May by Kevin MacLeod as my music for the clip and title cards from Michael Branson Smith to use in the piece.
I imported the clip into iMovie, where I muted the sound track and changed the saturation of the clip to zero to make it black and white. I then made title cards and inserted them throughout the film at appropriate points, which was honestly the hardest part of the process. As I was working on it, I decided that the end of the film would be the first signs of Neil’s recovery and chose to make the last bit of film after the dream partially in color by changing the original clip’s saturation to 51%.
The next assignment I chose for the 2 weeks of video was the Return to the Silent Era assignment from the assignment bank.
I started the pre-production for this assignment a couple of weeks ago, so it wasn’t hard to put all the pieces together in the two weeks we had.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow
I chose Django: Unchained because I felt like it could transfer easily to a silent film–since it’s a western style film and all. It was also pretty funny for me to think of a movie having the main character as a black bounty hunter killing white people during the silent film era. I’m sure that would have gone over SUPER well.
So first I found the trailer that had the least bit of talking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow
I removed all the “modern” stuff like the green preview screen and the text that is throughout the trailer. Then I used title cards I found from this website.
I found a couple of fonts that I liked on Dafont.com.
This font is used for most of the cards in the video.
This one was only used on the last card for the title of the movie.
I made each card in Adobe Photoshop then transferred the PNGs to Premiere Pro. With the cards and clips that I needed, I now only had to find some music. This was by far the hardest part. Finding music that not only sounded Silent Movie-ish yet still matched the clips…?
I eventually found some on Incompetech.com. I used “Dark Hallway,” “Comic Plodding,” “Villainous Treachery,” and “Iron Horse.”
Like I said in my pre-production blog post, I used a tutorial for After Effects to create a vintage feel to the clip.
Here’s a couple screenshots of my work.
As you can see, I had to find a way to repeat the film overlay that created a “distressed” look to the clip. I couldn’t figure out a way to loop it, so I figured it would just be easier to repeat it until the end of the trailer.
After watching this new trailer back, I realized that it may be interesting to discuss with my Civil War in American Memory class about how the film would be received in the silent film era. Like I said before, it would be quite a provocative and controversial subject to see a black man killing white people–and getting away with it–in the early 20th century.
Overall, I’m incredibly proud of this trailer. I thought this one would be one of the assignments that would be a throwaway video (we all have those! Don’t deny it!). However, after working on it and watching it back, I think it’s pretty awesome.
Return to the Silent Era 5 stars!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buLbrfdYvvk&feature=youtu.be
This is a video I did prep work on in a previous week. I chose the clip and stated so things I planned to do in order to make it in the silent genre and time.
To do this I removed the audio, put it in grayscale, and added a vintage filter. I enjoyed adding some little statements to help get the story across to the viewer.
I think by combining all of these aspects I was able to achieve a well put together piece that is coherent and fun. The music I added to the background seemed to tie the whole thing together.
So far I’ve completed 7 stars of Video Assignments. My next assignment is a BIG one, with 5 stars. I was a little nervous taking on a 5 star assignment, and while it was time consuming it wasn’t to terribly challenging.
My 5 star assignment was a “Return to the Silent Era“. For this assignment, you take a modern day movie trailer and turn it into black and white, remove the audio and replace it with a new sound track.
I chose The Hunger Games movie trailer for this assignment. It is a fairly new movie and I thought it would be a fun movie to recreate as a silent film. So, first I used KeepVid to download it as an MP4 to my computer. KeepVid is my go to for Youtube downloads, I find it the easiest and fastest program to use. From there I uploaded it into iMovie I cropped out parts that were not actual film (ie: release date info, etc).
When I decided to do this project, I looked at examples (which I usually do before fully committing) and the first example took me to Kelsie’s blog and her assignment was AMAZING! That girl is talented! But I read that she got her cue cards from google, so I headed over there myself and found a great choice for my video.
I plugged those into iMovie and added my script. I then went into each clip and transformed it into Black and White and cut the sound. All I had to do was put into the music. I went over to Freesound.org and just typed in Silent movie music. I chose this sound for the majority of the trailer. Then I typed in dramatic sounds and chose this sound because I felt it was perfect for two different parts of the trailer. After those downloaded, it was just a matter of putting them into iMovie and getting the sounds to match up with one another. There are two spots that do not have music, maybe for a couple of seconds. This wasn’t intentional at first, one sound ends and the second is very quiet in the beginning so there is just no sound.
Here is a screen shot of my work in iMovie. I couldn’t get the screen shot in one pictures so sorry for it being split up.
Once I had everything how I wanted it, I just uploaded it to Youtube and you can watch it below. I think it turned out really well and the music fit perfectly! Hope you enjoy.
Do you think you could watch a silent movie? I’m not sure I could, I like to hear the dialogue between characters.
12/16 stars
For my last video assignment, I wanted to really challenge myself. I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era {*****} assignment.
Since we first heard about our final projects, I wanted to make my last video assignment so it could tie into my final project character. There was only one problem, I didn’t want to base my final project character off of one assignment. I wanted to base my assignments off my final project character.
I chose to do my silent movie trailer on the movie Now You See Me (2013). The reason I chose this movie trailer is because I am dying to go see this movie because of the trailer. Movie trailers are created so people will want to go see that movie. If a trailer is dull, it might deter people away from going to see it.
I converted the trailer from YouTube into an MP4 file via KeepVid. I searched for music that I wanted to include in it on Freesound.org. I downloaded this silent movie music clip and decided to repeat it over and over until I would play this haunting clip. I planned to play the haunting clip when the tension is rising in the trailer.
Here is a screen shot of my work of art:
I liked the idea of the cue cards when putting in some words to keep the viewer on the same page as the storyline. If there weren’t any cue cards, I think everyone’s creative minds would be going at the speed of sound!! I also thought the cue cards played an interesting role. Obviously in movie trailers, there is a lot of dialouge going on. Having cue cards for this assignment made me pick out what words were important enough to have their own cue card. I got my cue card image from Google and used the ‘Stencil’ font to make it look old.
Here is my silent movie trailer:
Blog post title: Magic – B.o.B (ft. Rivers Cuomo)
