The assignment to take a movie trailer and make it into something that would be seen during the silent era was my favorite. This was one of the videos I did prework for, I used the trailer for the new James Bond movie Skyfall and with my own mash-up of some big band songs. I put both of these into my editing software Sony Vegas and went about adding effect to make it seem like an older movie and syncing my song to the video content. Hope you Enjoy. This was a 5 star assignment.
Return to the Silent Era *****
Other Good Examples:
Marcey’s Mean Girls: I thought it was good, but I really wish the music was a little faster. It felt like the pictures were at hyper-speed. The antiquing of the screen in the brown, the film strip shots were very cool. There was no word cards which may have helped tie the story together.
Ben’s Back to the Future: I was glad to see word cards. It seemed like the music didn’t match very well. I did like the change in the music, that made the scene have a definite beginning climax, and end. He choice to do black and white over the “browning” and I think they look equally old.
*I honestly have not clue how they did all of this because I haven’t looked a Windows Movie Maker yet… but I look forward to learning.
This assignment looked really interesting. It appealed to me 1) because I didn’t have to write a script and 2) I never thought about making a modern movie into a older movie. I thought the idea of the regression was spectacular. By looking at the examples, I thought that this would give me some good opportunity to mess around with Windows Movie Maker, not just editing but effects!
If you have been following my blog more closely, you might have noticed this is my second assignment where I use Finding Nemo. This movie is one of my hands down favorites! However, I original started to look through music. I found this song I really liked, so then, I thought what video can I match this with… Nemo was the first thing to pop into my head.
What is interesting is because there is only music and the occasion title card, the story is a lot harder to convey. It become crucial to find music that suits the clip, and pair down the dialogue to the most important message. I know that my case is different than others because I chose to do a trailer of a film and not a film clip, however this meant that I cant to tell the whole story of Finding Nemo in a few brief title cards and music. In hindsight I think it is easy to do a trailer versus doing a clip of the video because I can emphasis the theme through music and normally trailer are minimal words. My favorite part of my trailer is when the title card says “when all you can do is let go” and you see Marlin letting go of the tongue of a whale. This is my favorite part because “Letting Go” is one of the most important themes throughout the movie. When is it okay as a parent to let your children go off and make their own mistakes? But, it also has a very literal meaning in that scene.
The process to create this video assignment wasn’t too strenuous. I used the PWNYoutube bookmarklet (note this is used in every video assignment-link can be found here) Once I saved that I could upload it into my Windows Movie Maker (also used in every assignment). Then, I muted the video sound. Upload the song “gagool”. What I love about Windows Movie Maker, is that it automatically stops the music with your clip. You can go in a fade in/out the music, which I did, but Its not necessary unless it starts or ends at an awkward point. Once I did that, it was super easy to make the video black-and-white. Simply go under visual effects.. and surprise! So easy! Then, I created all my title cards. To do this I found a title card off of google image search, saved it as a picture, and uploaded into the Movie Maker. Then, I added a title; entered my words, moved the words from the title to the picture I had uploaded. The harder part is next, placing the title card within my movie. In order to do this, I watch the movie until I got to the point where I wanted to add the card, and then I hit split under the video editing menu. Once it was split, I could just drag my card over to the split and it was done. The music automatically extended to fit my longer movie (it will keep doing so as long as the song doesn’t run out). Then I did some fade in/out of the music. Once I saved, Movie Maker has a upload to YouTube button… life was good!
This week we’re beginning to make movies of our own in attempts to tell stories in that way. The task was to complete at least 16 stars worth of Video Assignments.
The first assignment that I decided to take a swing at was creating a movie trailer from the “Silent Era“. The goal of this assignment was to focus on the music and cue cards to make the movie trailer as interesting as possible. The movie assignment showed an example of the Star Wars movie trailer displayed silently with only words and music to draw you in. I think the example assignment did a good job of setting up how the movie should look and how it actually seems like a movie trailer from the “Silent Era’. I also watched another video from a student that decided to do the movie “Finding Nemo” and use different captions and a really good song to express the trailer for that fun loving kid movie that everyone would enjoy. I chose this assignment because I’ve never really been a fan of silent movies or movies from the old days, but I’ve always been one to support people having their own interpretations. I thought that it would be cool to make a modern movie silent and see the difference in it’s meaning when the actual words from the movie weren’t involved. “The Dark Knight” is actually one of my favorite movies and I just love all the intensity it has along with it’s actual story.
Through my Silent Era assignment I attempted to tell a story of the movie “The Dark Knight” and it’s major events by showing the trailer and providing captions that allowed someone to understand it. The actual trailer to the movie has words and dialogue that give you a glimpse of the movie … I attempted to do the same thing with my captions and music, but instead I summed up the key parts that I took out of the movie when I watched it initially. I started my clip off by saying where it took place and what the main purpose was… I made sure to include the lead actors in the movie as well. I then added another interesting point about the movie and then continued to have various captions of traits and actions that are found in the movie. I let the trailer do a lot of the talking, but I made sure to sum up the points I thought would be important for someone who hadn’t seen the movie to see.
In creating this trailer… I simply used www.keepvid.com to download the actual youtube movie trailer of “The Dark Knight” onto my computer. After doing so … I simply imported it into my iMovie and created a new project. I then adventured around with different features and figured out how to mute the sound and change the color into black and white. Then I adventured around with a song that I might want to play and figured that the “Halloween” theme song fit the action in the movie the best. I then downloaded the song as an mp3 file and placed it into my iMovie project. After watching the originally trailer multiple times and recalling the events I took from the movie myself … I decided I’d think of ways that I could display the story using the trailer. After I decided what I wanted to display in the movie … I added captions and found different places to put the font in order to use each scene as best I could. After all of this I did a lot of reviewing and editing to make it turn out as perfect as I could. Thankfully…. I have a few friends that are interested in the work that I do for this class and were willing to pitch in some ideas as well as watch my final piece. They each gave me different feedback and suggestions that I either chose to ignore or went back and edited. One of the suggestions that I received was to slow down some of scenes so that the captions I could posted could be read easily. A lot of my friends enjoyed my clip and said that it looked like it was hard or took a lot of time. I plan on posting it on my twitter as soon as I’m done with this post… maybe I’ll get a few comments & more feedback from there as well.
Total= 5/16 Stars!
The purpose of this assignment was to take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era; by converting it to black and white and replacing the audio with a musical sound track. On the other hand, use of title cards was recommended for this assignment as well.
The reason I considered to do this assignment was to experience what a modern movie sound like; if it was in the silent era. Secondly, there were many tutorials and examples available for this assignment; which was a great help for me to do this task.
For this assignment I reviewed Silent she’s the man , which I found very helpful since the process of doing this assignment was well explained; secondly, the example fulfilled most of the requirements for this assignment.
The other example that I review was Finding Neemo in Silence ; I found this example very interesting. I really liked the music track she used because it was going very well with the scene.
I also reviewed Martha Goes to Camp , which really gave me idea about my own project. I really liked how she used the cue cards to communicate the dialogues.
For this assignment I first downloaded Fast Five’s trailer using PwnYouTube , I then downloaded five Armies, which is a rock musical sound track, from Incompetech . On the other hand, I downloaded the cue cards from a google image search.
I then imported the Fast Five trailer video to Windows live movie maker for editing. I used the cue cards for telling the story in general; instead of using them for each dialogue. In addition, I muted the original audio of the movie and imported the Fast Armies musical sound track. after editing I uploaded to YouTube.
Here is The Silence of Fast Five:
Fast Five is one of my all -time favorite movie therefore, I considered this movie for this assignment. Because I wanted to know how it would sound if it was in silent era. I really enjoyed creating this assignment because I found it very interesting and fun to do.
Video Project Count: 5
So finally did the Return to the Silent Era assignment. It was fun, and this was the end result:
To make this video, it took a little bit of work. The most important of which was to pick out what I wanted to re-stylize. Of course I’ve already done a lot of work with The Big Lebowski previously in this class, so naturally that was one of the films I considered. I think why I chose to make a portion of this film as a silent movie is that the film itself relies so much on dialogue. Like most Cohen brother films the humor and interest of the film comes from character interactions. Also, as anyone to quote a Cohen brother film and they’ll likely give you a Lebowski quote.
With that in mind I decided to take on one of the most commonly quoted films, in either jest or anger: Walter berating Smokey over an alleged bowling violation. After I downloaded this original material to work with:
I threw it into Final Cut Pro and began to add film effects. I can’t remember exactly which ones I used exactly–there was a lot of experimentation–but in the end I ended up using about 4-5 different effects to get the look I wanted. Also something I remembered reading was that earlier films had a different frame/second ratio (fps ratio). So to simulate this I sped up the clip really fast and then toyed with making it slower by degrees till I look more old timey.
The hardest part was the title cards. If an image is too small with will come out blurry when inserted into film. So I had to hunt down a good title card and make it bigger. Props to Alan Levine’s blog for the source material here. This also explains why the text is so damn big, I kept coming out blurry since it was pasted over a blurry image (to get the text I just used the text files in Final Cut Pro). It was also while doing this that I noticed that most of the other students were doing moive trailers, example here. At this point I said, “Shit.” but decided I was too much in the hole now to go back, so i just focused on making my video the best I could.
Music was a bit tricky cuz length and timing were off, but I just tried to edit the song at good enough points and elongated it. It got the music form this website, couldn’t have been more perfect.
Anyhoo thats about it. Here’s a screenshot of what all that looked like:
ONWARD!!!!
This assignment took forever! The second video assignment I decided to do was Return to the Silent Era. This seemed like a really cool assignment because you had to take a trailer from a modern movie and make it antiquated and make it silent era-y.
So at first I wasn’t sure what movie exactly I wanted to do, but I know I wanted to do a movie that I knew pretty well and could work easily with to summarize the movie in the trailer. I watched a couple of the examples that had been done recently by students and really liked my friend Brittany’s silent trailer version of Finding Nemo. I really liked how she had the captions over the scenes of the trailer. I also saw examples that had separated the video clip with a slide with text. I liked putting words onto the actual video so I decided to go with that style for my assignment.
I decided on using a trailer for She’s the Man, with Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. So to start, I went to YouTube, found the trailer I wanted to use, and used Pwn YouTube to download it as a .mp4 file. Next, I uploaded this file onto Windows Movie Maker. I played around with the Visual Effects to see which effect I liked that portrayed a silent era style. I tried Black and White and also Sepia and went with Sepia just because the darks weren’t as dark and bleak and you could see more things clearly with Sepia.
Next was the most tedious part and took the most amount of time. I went through the whole two minutes of the video adding text to most of the video. When I had the part of the video where I wanted the text to go, I clicked Pause, and typed the text I wanted for that. I chose the Bella Donna font because I liked the old classic movie feel that it had to it. I adjusted the amount of time I wanted that particular text to remain on the video slide by changing the time. Different words I wanted to last longer and to be throughout several seconds so I kept those on the video longer. However, other words I didn’t want to last as long as I simpled chose to have it be for one or two seconds, and this also worked if I wanted to make the words come on and off the screen quickly so the viewer could process it like a spoken sentence.
That’s what took me most of the time. Next, I wanted to have a ragtime-y piano sound effect for the music used for my silent movie trailer. So I simply went to YouTube and searched “ragtime piano medley” and listened to a couple videos before deciding on this one. I liked how it was long enough to cover my two minute video and also I really liked the tempo, very upbeat and catchy. To convert it to mp3, I once again used the Video2mp3 website to convert the video to mp3. Next, I uploaded this file onto Audacity because there were parts in the beginning and end that I wanted to cut because it was the person sestting up on their piano and was unnecessary to include in my video. Once I trimmed these parts off, I saved it as a file, exported it, and then uploaded it to WMM. I made sure that it covered my video from beginning to end. Once it was added, I watched the whole thing through to make sure everything worked together and it did! So here is the final piece:
5 STARS
TOTAL STARS: 7/16
I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era assignment. This is worth five stars. The gist of the assignment is to turn a movie trailer (I did the Mean Girls trailer) into a silent movie. For instance, you take the sound away, make it look dated and add “cue cards.” I looked at one about Nemo that was done extremely well as a “background” on what mine should look like. The color of this one was very well done, as is the telling of the plot. However, the best one I saw was Martha’s on Young Teen Wolf. Amazing! The idea for a real cue card is fantastic. The music sounds realistic.
I choose this assingmnet honestly because I already did the “pre-production” for it. I had a picture of what I wanted to happen before I did it and I wanted to make sure my video making went somewhat smoothly. The inspriation was a picture of what Victorian/roaring 20s Mean Girls looked like. Did they “know the rules of feminism”? Did they were pink dresses on Wednesdays and flapper dresses only once a week?
This is part of a story because of what Mean Girls is. Tina Fey, one of the writers, meant it to be a sarcastic joke on how young women act and how they act towards each other. She meant it as a “ha I know this is funny, but it needs to change in our society” (Fey is a big feminist). I feel just thinking about the history of how women have always been vindictive toward each other and how it hasn’t really changed. How would those roaring 20s Mean Girls compare to the ones we have today?
Also, this is just a really good movie.
The process was to use PwnYouTube to snag the Mean Girl trailer off of Youtube. After that took forever to download, I threw that down into iMovie. Just to be clear, this is my first time using iMovie seriously. Then I took it in sections and made it “aged” by using iMovie’s pre-set template. Then I added “cue cards”/text over top of it. This was the hardest part. I couldn’t get it to just be for a few seconds. I played with it and realized the “duration” was for the “cue card” not the clip. After I did that for the rest of the clips, I added in transitions between the clips (Note: it is extremely hard to include all the plot, so to someone who has never seen Mean Girls, this is not what it is about exactly…). Then I went and speed them up by 150%. I left the muting part to last.
This was a mistake.
There are bits and pieces for some reason that just didn’t mute. They were mute in iMovie, I promise. When I played it there, it was actually silent. Then I uploaded it to Youtube and there were little chipmunk voices on some parts!
I don’t get it. So then I went back and tried to find the silly bits that weren’t muted… And they all were. I have no clue. Plus, it was already uploaded and my computer was sounding like a race car, which is a terrible noise to hear from a relatively new Macbook (p.s. does any one have a solution for this? I only had Safari and iMovie open!).
Then I went and downloaded this lovely piano music. The original was way to slow so I popped that bad boy into Audacity and speed it up by like 33% and changed the pitch to like C#. I can’t tell if it sounds good/realistic or like an organ is dying.
Anywho, besides that whole muting snafu, which kind of defeats the purpose of “silent” movie, I learned a lot from this. I had no clue iMovie had all of those presets before, nor did I know it was so “powerful.” It was a really good experience!
Also, the font is tiny. Forgive me, many first time mistakes.
To me, Return to the Silent Era seemed like such a unique project. It involves taking a modern movie and transforming it into a time piece. To give it an old timey feel, it was suggested to change it to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, take away the sound, add music, and maybe some title cards too. I got some really good ideas from examples. However, most were done with iMovie and it took me some time to figure out how to do it with Windows Movie Maker. My favorite example was one done with Mean Girls. It is actually one of my friend’s projects. She did a really good job in speeding up the movie. It was the first example I looked at so I got a feel for the “antiquity” part of the assignment. I also think the movie was a really good choice because the idea of it is very far from the older Silent Movies. The next example I looked at was Martha’s on Teen Wolf. I loved how she changed the wording to words they might have used in older times. It gave a really unique feel to the video. She also used unique cue cards. Using these two examples I put my own twist on Finding Neemo.
I chose this assignment because it is extremely unique. Silent Movies are rarely seen anymore. In fact, more effects are being added to a movie every day. I believe that silent movies really capture the actual story without extra things being added. Don’t get me wrong, special effects can add so much to a movie but I think occasionally it’s nice to just watch a good story. So the real reason I chose Finding Neemo is because it truly is my favorite movie. I think the animation in it is awesome. It’s very realistic to actual fish movement (having taking Bio of Fish and spent a summer working in an aquarium I would know). The story is also very inspiring. It’s about a fish who comes out of his shell to save his son and the adventure of a son getting into a bit of trouble. In the end, everything is happy. The two are reunited and life is wonderful. So of course, this was the story I was going to put the characters in silence. I really want the story to stand out and taking away vocals really makes that happen.
I started with Pre-Production first. I got all of my materials together including: Finding Neemo Trailer, tools I needed to use, an idea of what effects to use, and a sample of my music. I have never really used Windows Movie Maker before so it was a bit of an on-going tough process. I first had problems uploading my video to it. Apparently WMM doesn’t work well with mp4. So I downloaded real player to convert it to a .wmv file. It worked like a charm. I then uploaded my video to WMM and sat and stared for about 15 minutes. I had no idea what to do. So, I went for the basics. I found the effects bar and dragged the “black and white” effects to my movie. I didn’t like it, so I deleted that effects. I then added the sepia effects and that was better. The black and white was too harsh for me. It was then I found the “film age, old” effects. And it was perfect. Slowly this film was starting to look like a silent movie. But, there was one problem: the sounds. I had no idea how to delete the vocals on the movie. I started playing around with volume and random buttons. I finally googled it and found a simple explanation: Clip tab, audio, mute. So simple! It still wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to add in some sort of titles. I didn’t like the look of adding the titles and separating the clip. With WMM you could only change the back ground color (Martha’s were much cooler) so I added the titles on the clip. I actually really liked how the captions turned out. I played around with the font until I came across one that had a “flow” to it. I first had them in black, but they didn’t stand out enough. And since it was supposed to be colorless I changed it to white and it turned out perfectly! I thought everything was too slow so I then sped up the movie. There were already a few frantic clips so I didn’t speed it up too much (FYI a hint, speed up the movie before adding in clips). The next step was the music. I searched youtube for a ragtime piano music. I looked through a lot of them and didn’t like them. Some had vocals, some were too slow, some just didn’t sound right. The music I chose was actually on the first page I had just skipped over it because it was too slow. I decided to play with it. I loaded it into audacity and sped it up a bit. I also changed the tempo some too. I thought it sounded OK, so I added it to the film. The music is actually my favorite part! I think it goes along perfectly with the beat of the characters in the movie!
The credits were the last piece. I wanted to give credit where credit was due (mainly me, but added in Disney and Pixar too). I also felt since it was originally a trailer it left the audience hanging. That wasn’t the silent movie way so I added in what happens in the end on the credits too. There are many things I could have added (old fashion words, cool title slides) but I felt the way I put everything together had the effect I was shooting for. I didn’t want to change the story around, just make it old fashioned. I really like how the whole thing came together in the end.
I tried to get some feedback on this project, but was wildly unsuccessful. I showed my mom when I went home to vote and she said it was “cute” and “good work”. Not much enthusiasm there… And then there was my roommate who really liked it but laughed at the amount of time and how frustrated I got with it. She sort of went through the process with me and had to listen to the tangents I went on about how WMM wouldn’t work. However, the best feedback is how proud I am of the video (I know, cheesy right?)
So I think the overall story is how I worked through my problems and created this piece. It was my first time working with WMM and other tools and had to figure out a few quirks to get going. This is just a start of my video work and there is more to come. I’m sure I will have more difficulties and frustrations to come with those projects however, now I have an idea of how to work through them (mainly Google).
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 is 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 a 5 star assignment
I chose this assignment because it really interested me. I never have seen a silent film and that’s because they were not around when I was growing up. I picked the movie Monsters Inc and the song to go with . I wanted to make this funny Disney Pixar movie to look more scary and suspenseful. I know the assignment said that the movie trailer should be 3-5 minutes but it is hard to find a movie trailer that long.
In my pre production work I reviewed two already done silent movie trailers. One was for the Disney Pixar’s Up and the other was for The Hunger Games Silent Trailer. I really enjoyed watching both of them. I will have to say for the Hunger Games silent movie trailer the music didn’t go nearly as well with what was happening in the trailer. In the Up I thought the movie trailer the music went really well with what was happening in the movie. From these movie trailer I decided to do was to have a song that went well with the movie as well as make the movie look more like a scary movie than a funny movie for kids.
I first downloaded a clip using PwnYoutube that included the Monsters Inc trailer for the new 3D release of the movie. I then put the movie into windows movie maker. I changed the back ground to black and white and eliminated the sound. Then I added the song, I have already had this song previous bought and downloaded from itunes. I then uploaded this video to YouTube.
This is the first video assignment that I have completed, and the first real video editing that I have done. Any comments with feedback will be appreciated on all of my video assignments that I do over these next 2 weeks.
Below is my embedded video for the assignment Return to the Silent Era:
Not gonna lie – I’m pretty good with iMovie. In fact, I teach people how to use it professionally. (I’m an instructional technologist.) So instead of planning out my video projects this week, and then executing them next week, I’m just going to stagger the projects. And maybe do a couple extras just for fun, we’ll see.
My first project is inspired by the recent acquisition of the Star Wars franchise by Disney. As soon as I saw the Disneyland commercial starring Darth Vader (and a few anonymous storm troopers, as all storm troopers are) I knew I wanted to use it for one of my video projects. And given the brilliance that is Silent Star Wars, I felt inspired to make my own attempt at a Star Wars silent film. A Disney one, that is.
To create this, I followed my usual process of pulling the video from YouTube via PwnYoutTube. I then imported the video into iMovie (File -> Import -> Movie) and copied the entire thing into a new Project. I removed the beginning and end stills and added my own. The introduction uses the “Far Far Away” title format, and the end uses a basic “Centered” title. I then removed the audio from the main portion of the commercial:
I liked the sound of Darth Vader breathing from the beginning of the original commercial, so I selected that portion of the video in the Event Library and dragged it onto my opening title slide (be sure that the playhead cursor is at the point where you want the audio to begin, in this case the very beginning of the footage). This brought up the overlay menu and I selected Audio Only. The audio clip wasn’t long enough, so I had to duplicate it to cover all of the opening.
For the main portion of the video, however, I wanted to use a traditional silent film score. Some Google digging brought me to Incompetech’s listing of freely available stereotypical silent film scores (if you are looking for a particular film’s score, you’d probably have better luck with the Internet Archive or another repository of copyright-free resources). The song “Merry Go – Distressed” had the playful tone I wanted (plus, Vader actually rides on a Merry-Go-Round, so it seemed like a felicitous song to use). I dragged it into iMove (again matching the playhead). The song is longer than the footage, so I had to add a fade-out. To do this:
The most challenging part of this was generating the film grain – iMovie has some default options available, but none of them had the look I wanted. I went with the Aged Film effect (Options gear -> Clip Adjustments -> Video Effects), and then started to dig for other options.
I really liked what Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) achieved with his Silent Era Back to the Future (and discovered that apparently we had used the same score source), so I looked into the Particle Illusion graphics he used. I found working with the individual images to be cumbersome, so I converted them into a separate movie, which you can view or Pwn on YouTube. I then imported the movie into my Events Library and dragged it onto the footage to create an overlay. From the overlay menu I selected Cutaway (some tutorials will tell you to use Picture in Picture, but this doesn’t allow you to change the opacity). I then went to the Options menu for the grain overlay and under Clip Adjustments set the Opacity to 21% (the exact percentage will vary depending on the main footage you are working with, but I’ve found that somewhere in the 20-30 range allows you to see the grain without making the footage difficult to see).
Finally, inspired by the gorgeous title cards Ben had used from CopyCatFilms, I redid the end still of the twitter hashtag #starwarsdisney. And thus was born the Silent Era version of Darth Vaders first trip to Disneyland.
