this is my return to silent era video assignment. I really liked the idea of remaking the modern remake of this film even older then the original. There is a large amount of work represented here even though every step seems to make things easier. Things like removing the audio and inserting an appropriate background music, and making the clip look older and not the HD that it is all sounds simple…its not. first off the pace of my video was way to fast so slowing that down was the first thing i did. then I took out every part that was too fast , had too much dialogue, or generally didn’t fit with my idea. I then found a soundtrack that matched the pace I had set my video to and still sounds great for True Grit. cutting the exactly timed music clip and converting it into mp3 in audacity then into iTunes so iMovie will recognize it was a task in itself. Then doctoring saturation, contrast, and brightness to hide the hd.
Return to the Silent Era: Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows Style
I Got the trailer for Harry potter from youtube. I used AVS Video editor to edit the video. I added the Vintage look effect thoughout the whole movie. Then I went though and got rid of the more confusing sceans. Finally I used lficker to create the cue cards for the dialogue. I really liked Harry potter and I felt it would be a cool undertaking. It took forever to figure out how to edit the video initally but within a few days the process really sped up! I hope you enjoy….. Harry Potter Aand the Deathly Hallows Silent edition!
And considering I haven’t made many videos…well, I don’t have a lot to go on. Still, this project was AMAZINGLY fun and really not too difficult!
So I took this trailer for the movie The Bourne Identity and attempted to make it look like it was a silent film – see project details here.
Using iMovie, I detached then deleted the audio. Then I deleted the scenes that didn’t fit in with a silent film, like the snazzy text slides that said “danger is Bourne” and the title scene. Then I used the Aged Film filter for everything – that’s such a useful tool!!
I made a template for my text slides by using PowerPoint; I haven’t figured out how/if GIMP will allow me to draw straight lines; I knew PowerPoint would, so I just made the template there. It was simply a black background, with a white border, and I made a little target lens design for the top, since that’s kind of the icon of the movie. I watched through the trailer a couple of times trying to figure out key scenes and key dialogue that absolutely had to be included; I narrowed it down to 10 or 11 text slides. After that, it was easy enough to go back through the trailer in iMovie and split the clip wherever I wanted to insert the text slide.
The hardest part by far – and I knew it would be – was choosing the music. I don’t know much about classical music; I could hear in my head the kind of music I wanted it to be, but I had absolutely no clue how to find it. Using the links page Professor Levine kindly made for us, I searched through the 78 RPM and Cylinder Recordings archive.
The music I ended up using was Samuel Barber: Symphony No. 1, Op. 9, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Bruno Walter. If you would like to hear the original piece, go here. I edited the track quite a bit in Audacity to make sure that I had appropriate sounds at appropriate times, so it isn’t exactly the same.
Then I stuck it all together and came up with this. I’m actually really excited by it!
The drumbeats are definitely a second or two off at the beginning, but everything else fit so perfectly that I let it slide, because I wasn’t sure how to edit that part without destroying how the rest of the music was in sync.
Wow, I needed a does of ds106 creativity, so I set out tonight to do the very assignment I submitted, Return to the Silent Era:
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. As an example, see Silent Star Wars. Get creative and choose a movie that would look most unlikely to be done from this era.
Presenting… 1901: A Spatial Odyssey:
On my walk home tonight I was rummaging what movies of the future would be fun to retro back, and landed on 2001: A Space Odyssey. I used the “Stop Dave, I’m Afraid” segment where Dave Bowman is working his way toward shutting HAL down- the monologue is all HAL.
After downloading the clip and bringing into iMovie, I first added the effects to the entire clip- I could not combine black and white and the aged film effect, so instead I used the video effects to desaturate the color and add brightness to create the black and white; the aged film effect gives it a tad of a sepia tone.
I then played through the movie, and did splits at each point where HAL spoke; I inserted a screen card I found by google image searching on “silene movie title card”, this one from the thelinuxexperiment.com
and I removed the “Bang” to make a blank card. At each split, I inserted a 4 second still of the card, with one of the glow effects on it, and added the centered title. I found I could copy/paste the card image, and could duplicate the title by option dragging the blue title track (preserving the font and sizes I had used).
Once I had transferred all fo HAL’s lines to text, I select everything and used Edit-Mute CLips to remove the movie sounds. I then found the Batty MacFaddin music from Kevin MacLeod’s royalty free music site. Then it was adding some closing credits, and one closing shot of HAL and a special guest.
While the assignment said do a trailer, I liked doing a segment of the movie as a silent film. This was a blast and a half!
For this assignment, I edited the 2005 King Kong movie trailer to make it more like a 1930ish silent movie trailer. This worked out well because the movies plot is set during the Great Depression (1933).
I used Sony Vegas 7.0 for this. I’m usually hesitant about resorting back to my Windows PC, however, I needed to for these video assignments as Vegas is only available for Windows. Sony Vegas has many effects that helped me to accomplish the vintage – old film effect for this assignment. Of course there was the black and white effect, however, I also applied the film grain effect and some film scratch/hair and jitter effects. Also, to make it more vintage, I cut out the current Universal intro/logo and put in the old intro from back in the 1930s.
For the music track, I used one audio layer of “Beauty Killed the Beast Pt 5″ which played throughout the trailer. However, for the intense footage in the trailer, I added a second audio track layered on top and used snippets and sections from “Last Blank Space on the Map.” Both audio files were off from youtube (links below).
Beauty Killed the Beast Pt5 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06odMZRZMBg
Last Blank Space on the Map – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjbASG6dLtY
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.
I hope you enjoy….. Harry Potter Aand the Deathly Hallows Silent edition! 
