Video Assignment

Return to the Silent Era – ds106 assignment worth 5 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. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.

One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search

This is one of the assignments that I chose to do the preparation work on in Week 10.  I found it was harder than I expected to find Moulin Rouge clips online – the copyright hounds have been hard at work for this movie.  I did, however, manage to find a great little scene from when Christian and Satine meet.  The scene and the conversation are both filled with complete confusion, and is definitely a classic from the film.  I love how the setting of the movie already creates a feel of the era that I’m trying to capture for this assignment – the silent film era.

For the music, I wanted something bouncy and old-timey and fun, to capture the feel of the scene.  I went to Incompetech as the assignment page suggested, and downloaded Betty McFaddin’s piano piece.

For the title cards, I did a google image search, also as suggested in the assignment description.  I scrolled through the images and selected the one I liked.  I saved it to my working file on my computer, and then went on to take a look at where the card came from.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Google had lead me to ds106′s own Michael Branson Smith‘s blog and Return to the Silent Era Assignment post!  I decided to stick with my choice, and send the appropriate nod of appreciation to the fellow ds106er in my blog and in my credits.

Next came the task of trying to figure out how to actually put this thing together.  I began doing research, and began to get frustrated with how much can be done with video on a Mac, and how little can be done on a PC.  Finally, I went to twitter, and browsed the #ds106 hashtag.  Eventually, I found that fellow ds106er Lauren had used Windows Live Movie Maker to make her silent era clip.

return to the silent era is DONE! check it out @cogdog #ds106: dontstrayaway.com/2012/11/12/sil…

— Lauren Strayhorn (@laurstray20) November 12, 2012

Thanks, Lauren!  I was literally about to give up on the project completely and start a new one, despite the prep work I’d done on this one.

So I downloaded Movie Maker (and opted out of all of the 5 million other programs it tried to give me ).  I had already shorted the YouTube clip (which I downloaded using the KeepVid KeepIt button I put on my browser toolbar), using MPEG Streamclip, to get just the parts I wanted.  I uploaded the music into the video, created a Title page and ending Credits, and uploaded the blank silent movie title card from Michael Branson, and copied and then pasted it a bunch of times so I could have it available each time I split the video.

I already had the script out, so I zoomed in on the clip and began hunting for the appropriate split moments, and inserted the blank title cards there.   I used Viner Hand IT font, just to be different and fun.  I also made the clip black and white, and changed the ratio to 4:3, because in one of the assignments I’d reviewed, I had read that this was standard of the silent movie era (I admit to having no idea whether it’s true or not, but it looked neat when I tried it, so I kept it).   I regretted not being able to do more to the clip to make it look old.  Stupid Windows.  But whatever.  Do what you can with what you’ve got, right?  Finally, I went through the final video and found the clips where there was only dancing and no talking.  These I sped up to 1.25x normal speed.  I was surprised to see how ridiculous it looked any faster than that, and pleased with 1.25x.

I had about 5,000 crashes of Windows Movie Maker while trying to make this.  I learned to save literally after every click.  ‘Select font, Ctrl+S, Type, Ctrl+S, Split, Ctrl+S…aaaaaaaaand crash.’  *sigh*  It was beyond frustrating.  Still, it deleted my credits with no explanation, and I had to redo things several times.

My husband never ceases to be amazed at the kind of craziness that happens with electronics when I come near.  But I knew going into this class that this was going to happen, and did it anyway.  So it’s my own fault.  I made it through, eventually.

And I think it turned out half decent, at least.    Not bad for a first go at this, anyway.

• Return to the Silent Era, in this assignment we had to show a trailer and turn it to grayscale, make it olden day looking and lastly add music and sayings from the movie, and here is is the link. I watched the example given to us about Star Wars to get an idea of what I wanted to do.
• I chose this assignment because this was an opportunity to make something original. The back story of this is that I always wondered what peoples perspectives were of olden looking movies. Now a days these kind of movies are bringing back the film noir of back then.
• This is taking a modern day film and making it into a film of olden times. Its interesting because you really have to have a certain type of movie to make it seem realistic. as for mine I think its best as a modern day film. To make this movie known as a comedy I feel like the text had to be added. Of course the text is modern as well.
• I used youtube to find the movie trailer of Think like a Man. Then I also found the song Love on Top instrumental on youtube for the audio. I used Windows Movie Maker to put this whole assignment together. I added the effects of gray scale and old age to the movie. Lastly I added text where I wanted to put through out the video.
• I showed my roommates and they agreed that it looked good but it one thing they said is this movie Think like a Man should be kept in color.

This might be my new favorite assignment this year.  It was certainly challenging, and time consuming, but it was a blast to do.  I thought the idea of “Drive” was a good choice because the main character “Driver” hardly speaks at all in the movie.  In fact, he has maybe 10 more lines in the entire movie that aren’t said in the trailer.  I didn’t want to simply use the same words from the trailer, so I used most of the same ones, with a little comedy added in.  The movie itself is pretty serious, and in my opinion there are a few unnecessary gory scenes such as a girl getting shot in the face with a shotgun, but overall I really do like the movie and I think its a good watch.  The biggest issue I had with this assignment was the the timing of the scenes.  It runs a little faster than I wanted because I couldn’t get them exactly right, but I still think it turned out pretty well.

For this assignment, I chose to do the silent movie.

First, I had to choose a movie. I chose the trailer of Elf because I start watching Christmas movies right after Halloween (or during…). I picked the trailer because it gave such a good overview.  I downloaded it from youtube using iLivid, you just paste the URL in there and it will automatically download the video for you. Once the video was downloaded, I put it into Adobe Premiere. Here’s where it began to take about 6 hours to finish.

I had never really worked with Premiere and there is a HUGE learning curve. Finding out how to mute the track volume was not difficult at all, mainly because when you look to the bottom right of the program, it lists Video 1 and Audio 1. I simply muted the audio. The big problem came with those dang cue cards. I used ones that nearly everyone else I looked at had used. The hard part was figuring out what text to put on them. Once I decided, I tried to import them into Premiere. BIG TROUBLE! I could not for the life of me get these puppies to work right.

I took a deep breath and finally got them spliced in where I needed them, although it chopped up the video and at one point I had two of the same exact thing playing…anyway! (Also, please excuse the third one because it lasts wayyyyy too long but I did not know how to cut it down without messing up the entire video. I tried using the razor tool but it wouldn’t let me slide the rest of the video down to fill in the gaps…so it just leaves more time for the audience to read.) I went to the dropdown menu of video effects and added black adn white and noise by simply pulling those options directly on to the timeline thing of the video and audio. Once I got that mess straightened out, I pulled in the music from the soundtrack. I chose the nutcracker suite because it’s instrumental and it actually ended up going really well with the clip I selected (plus, it came from the soundtrack.)

After what felt like an eternity razoring the video and trying to get everything perfect, I decided to export the media as an mp4. I chose maximum render quality and it exported within a few minutes to my desktop. From there, I put it on youtube and then blogged about it here. Hooray!

Silent Era

This assignment was to take a modern movie clip and revert it to an old silent film.

Once again, the outcome of my christmas mood. What funnier movie for being in the Christmas spirit then ELF! My roommate and I had just watched this movie several days before, so that’s probably why it came to mind. Elf is a funny movie just for the silliness that  characterizes Buddy.  There were not very many clips available online for this movie. So, it narrowed down what I could us.  I searched through youtube and found a scene from elf that would still seem to have a plot without sound.

I choose the scene where Buddy, the elf, meets his dad for the first time. He has just come from the North Pole where he discovered he was not an elf but a human. And now he is in New York to meet his real dad. But…he’s dad has no idea he had buddy. So, as buddy walks into he’s fathers office dressed as an Elf everyone is confused. They think buddy has dressed and been sent as a “Christmas Gram” to sing for the office.

After finding it on Youtube, i used PwnYouTube to download the clip as an MP4.

Then, I opened the scene in Imovie where i could edit it. First, i fiddled around to find out how to convert the film into black and white. Once in black and white I then had to create cues.  I saved a background used by professor Alan on his blog . Then, I opened this photo in Gimp. I then made a powerpoint with the words i wanted to put in my cue. After saving the powerpoint as a picture, I opened it as a layer on top of my background photo.

I did this process several times and then inserted the photos into the film.

After the motion part was complete, I canceled out the normal sound on the film. Then, I added a song from my itunes.

Walahh!! Elf as a classic,silent, black and white,  old school film