VideoAssignments733 – Assignment Bank

Week Eleven – Coming Down the Home Stretch

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Here I am wright my blog about week 11

Wait, Wasn’t that 3 weeks ago? What have you been doing?

Well a little thing called life has popped up and boy has it been crazy. I got put on back to back to back work travel during the weeks and weekends and my time management went right out the door. Well here I am today to catch up. I know im late to the party but Im here to do the work and learn from this class.

The first thing I want to recap is the short film that Anne and I did. Anne and I took our radio show that we created and created a feature film to show the aftermath. I was inspired to make this short film by the Holocaust and Humanities Class I took her at UMW. In this class, we studied interviews by survivors and I felt these were also the best way to understand what an individual did to survive.

I had to travel during the week to San Francisco so I was able to get some great live shots on the west coast. Anne and I took our characters to the next level and created an awesome video. Anne was such a great partner and I truly enjoyed working with her.

Here is our video The Second Chance:

Video Assignment : The Night of The Living Dead – Character/Genre Song Mashup

For this video assignment, I decided to twist it a little to give it a personal touch. What I did was take the final scene in the movie where Ben is mistakenly murdered by the posse and add in tragic, sad music. I feel like the music adds an additional level of tragedy to the ending. Here is the clip below.

Finally, to answer the question of the week… the first thing I would do after I heard the world was ending would be to call my family and try to figure out how we could all survive. If there are no options, then I guess thats the time to say goodbye.

Till Next Week,

Geoff

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Movie Time!

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This week, we continued our unit on video! One of the first assignments was to watch another apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic movie! Last week, I watched The Quiet Earth. This week, I watched a movie that I really, really enjoyed, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the 1951 version).

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this movie! As I have said before, I am not the biggest science-fiction fan, however, this movie was so good! I also have a special place in my heart for old black and white movies. My mom and I used to watch them all the time on the Turner Classic Movies channel. My favorite one was Bringing Up Baby.

Anyways, The Day the Earth Stood Still is about how a UFO lands in the middle of Washington D.C. one day. Klaatu, a ‘human’ who changes his name to Mr. Carpenter as to seem more ‘human,’ comes to Earth on behalf of the aliens in order to learn about the Earth’s humanity during the Cold War-era. His and his robot friend, Gort, seem to terrorize the city, even though they are not looking to harm anyone or anything, as long as everything goes well. Klaatu meets a family, and spends time with and befriends the young son, Bobby, who has no idea that this man is the ‘space-man’ that everyone is looking for, and is able to learn more about the world and meet some very important people. I won’t spoil too much, though! It is such a good movie! If you’ve never seen it, I strongly recommend it!

After watching this movie, I completed a video assignment to go along with the movie! I chose to do the assignment, Character/Genre Song Mashup, from the assignment bank. Basically, I took different scenes of Klaatu and Gort from this film, and interspersed scenes and clips of other futuristic/alien films and TV shows, such as The Jetsons, Lilo and Stitch, Star Trek, and Wall-E, and set it all to two songs that I think mesh well with this content/genre. The songs I chose were “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons and “Pompeii” by Bastille. I do not own these songs or these movies/TV-shows that were included in this video.

Take a look!

I hope you enjoyed it! Let me know what you think!

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Watch a Movie/Make a Movie

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I watched Night of the Living Dead

My initial reaction when I opened the film was that it was xtra creepy because it was in black and white. Also bless tht it was free.

the movie is based on a zombie/ flesh-eating theme where the humans are trapped inside the house and need to keep the zombies from getting in in order to stay alive. ive actually played many video games where they copied the premise of the movie. I found it interesting how the “Leader” Ben tries to keep everyone safe even though he stays alive the longest.

also side note, why are all apocalyptic leaders named ben i.e the guy in Lost…

Anyways, this movie felt doomed to begin with because even if they kept them out of the house, they had no food source so they were going to starve anyways.

so this is the movie on youtube cut up with White Iverson// Post Malone in the background

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Summer Songs

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If Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe” was last summer’s “song of summer,”

this summer’s tune has to be Icona Pop’s “I Love It.”

To honor that, I made this:

The project stems from the DS106 assignment “Character/Genre Song Mashup” (aka Visual Assignment 733).

The theme of the video clips selected: Er…. they’re from The Twilight Zone (with the exception of a short clip from “Alcohol is Dynamite“)

The song: “I Love It” by Icona Pop. It’s catchy and you can dance to it.

The tools: iMovie ’11

What I did: I haven’t watched all of the assigned Twilight Zone episodes, so I thought back to the ones I have seen and considered the scenes that would kind-of-sort-of fit the song. Telly Savales falling down the stairs in “Living Doll” was an obvious choice as was footage from “Midnight Sun.”

I downloaded clips from Youtube using clip converter. I’ve been using this Firefox add-on since Camp Magic Macguffin, and it works well for me. Though I’m sure most of these converters have the option to download portions of videos, I found that an especially useful feature for this project.

Settings for clip converter

I opted to save my clips as a .mp4, because that’s what I’ve been doing and it seems to work. I know very little about codecs. Am I even using the right terminology? Is a .wmv a codec or is that just a file type? I should probably look into that….

I converted and saved all of the clips I wanted to work with to my desktop, because that’s the easiest thing for me to do. I created a new project in iMovie called Twilight Zone. Next, I imported all of Twilight Zone .mp4 files in a new event that I called DS106zone.

iMovie process

Most of the clips in the DS106zone event were longer than necessary, so I selected the portions of the clips I wanted, and dragged them to the Twilight Zone project.

I don’t have Icona Pop’s “I Love It” in my music library (because I listen to music through Rdio if I listen to music at all), so I converted the Youtube video to MP3 and then imported that file into my iMovie project. I only used about a minute of the song, because it’s ~~very hard to~~ too time-consuming to find three minutes worth of clips to match with the song.

Once the soundtrack was in place, I moved the video clips around to fit with the lyrics of the song. I muted the volume in the video tracks by reducing volume to 0%. This can be done under “audio adjustment” for each clip.

iMovie screen shot

A lot of folks poo-poo iMovie. It works fine for the video work that I do. I’m sure it has limitations for the hardcore video editors out there. The only problem I’ve encountered is when students try to do a group project at school. It’s impossible (or at least not easy) for students to work asynchronously on a group project without a lot of network account black magic.

This project’s biggest time suck is gathering and organizing the footage. I had a vague mental idea–a mental story board, if you will–of what I wanted the project to look like. That helped with the efficiency of the clip selection, conversion, and editing process.

Christina Hendricks recently tweeted:

@indieschoollib So fun! Hadn’t heard this song before. is @IamTalkyTina a “90s bitch”? (meant in a nice way, of course)

— Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc) June 16, 2013

This gave me the idea to create and use several frames of Talky Tina floating through space during the closing credits rather than the space ship. I’ll add that to my “to do” list.

I also need to add this to my blog:

Official Internet Web Badge

So honored!

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Love Genre Mashup

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I chose the theme Love for my genre song Mashup. I thought this would be a cute montage. I found clips of people kissing and that seemed really “in love” (haha) and imported them into windows movie maker.

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Spaceships

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In honor of Firefly’s 10th Anniversary of it’s cancellation I decided to do a tribute assignment to them in the Genre/Song Mash up. in this we were to take clips from varies TV shows/movies that exhibit a similar aspect and set it to a popular song of today.

For Mine I chose Alligator Sky by Owl City and did a science fiction style spaceship motief featuring shots of Serenity, the space ship from Firefly. I thought the song lined up perfectly with the shots, and I tried to capture the emotional bond between Captain Reynolds and Serenity. Clips include many shots from star wars, star trek, Firefly and others. I hope you enjoy your flight, ad remember to be good to your ship.

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Monsterrrrrrrrrrs!

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I completed the Character Genre Song Mashup. This was similar to the anime assignment so I found it easier to complete. We chose a theme from various movies and put it together and related a song of today to it. I looked at the example given, as there were no other examples put up. It gave me an idea of what to do, and I understood the concept of witches.
I chose this assignment because it was similar to the anime assignment. Then I thought of Monsters, and the first thing that came to mind was Monsters Inc. Then i decided to think of animated movies with monsters in it. This really hit my childhood, and favorite movies of mine. Though, it was hard to think of animated movies with monsters, because though you may think there are a lot, we can not get them confused. Such as Shrek, there aren’t any true monsters in there.
So I came up with Monsters Inc, Scooby Doos: Monsters unleashed, and Monsters vs. Aliens. This video shows how animated movies have scary characters, however in the end they always get beat, unless the Monsters are the good guys For me I made this video have a twist with cute animation I chose to use the song Monster by Kanye West and Nikki Minaj.
So I chose trailer clips of the three movies from Youtube, and trimmed what I wanted from each trailer from MPEG streamclip. I then took the clips I wanted and opened them into Window’s Movie Maker. Where I put the Clips in the order I felt fit the audio I made. I recorded Monster from my itunes into Audacity. Then I chose parts I wanted from the song and put it together. I used fade ins/and outs. I also amplified and and pumped up the bass in the song.
I actually showed this video to my friend who introduced me to this song, because Nikki Minaj says Sri Lanka in her song, which is where I’m from. So he thought it was cool that I connected it to my video and likes that some of the lyrics fitted perfectly with the video.

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Character/Genre Mashup

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As soon as I saw this assignment, I knew I had to do it! It looked like something I would really enjoy doing and I was really surprised to see that 0 people had completed the assignment yet! So I thought, why not? I looked at Alan’s video and really liked how he put all kinds of clips from TV and movies from all different sorts of genres and combined them all together with a piece of music overtop.

At first I saw the suggestion “beaches” as another example you could try but I wanted to do something different (definitely NOT anything soccer) this time. So I decided on romance. But I wasn’t sure what song I wanted to use. Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” came to mind. But I thought that would be a little too intense for this assignment so I searched “popular love songs” on Google and this was the first site that came up! It was Top 100 Wedding Songs and I browsed through these and saw “My Boo” by Usher & Alicia Keys. I knew right then that this would be PERFECT! This is one of my all-time favorite songs and I love jamming out to it!

So to begin, I just started brainstorming really famous movie and TV couples. One of the first I thought of was Barney and Robin from the TV show How I Met Your Mother. This is one of my favorite TV shows currently and their love story is really cool so I wanted to definitely use them. Next, I thought of Noah and Allie from The Notebook, because, obviously, most people have seen this movie and it’s definitely a great love story (so I used two different clips with this one). From that point on, I just started writing down as many movie and television couples I could think of. I Googled “famous movie couples” and “famous TV couples” and got some inspiration there. I also asked a few friends to name a few off the top of their head and came up with a few great ideas.

To get the clips, I would search YouTube for whatever particular scene I was looking for. I found that I got the best results whenever I typed in the movie/TV show, then the names of the people in the couple, then romantic scenes or whatever YouTube automatically came up with. For example, I searched “Glee Rachel and Finn Romantic Scenes” to get a clip of these two singers. When I found the video that contained the scene I wanted to use, I clicked the Pwn YouTube button and clicked MP4 to save the file onto my computer. Next, I opened MPEG StreamClip and uploaded that file. I used the Select In and Select Out features of this program to cut the specific scene I wanted from the video. Then I clicked Trim to just isolate that scene and then saved it.

Next, I uploaded that file onto Windows Movie Maker and played the scene through to make sure it started and ended exactly where I wanted it to. I did this for each scene until I had enough scenes to cover the length (3:36) of the song. Once I had all of the scenes that I wanted, I played around with the order of the scenes so that there was a mix of TV and movie scenes and it wasn’t just straight movie or straight TV scenes back to back.

I really wanted to focus on using TV shows from when I was younger, or couples that really stood out to me that I really liked. For instance, I was OBSESSED with Boy Meets World when I was younger so a scene with Cory and Topanga was an obvious choice for me. I loved the show Lizzie McGuire too because I always felt like I could relate to her life when I was in middle school. So her and her best friend Gordo were a “duhh” choice as well! Every day before school in 5th grade I would watch Saved By the Bell. I loved the show! The clothes were crazy and the characters were all so funny! So that’s why I chose a scene with Zach and Kelly. Many more examples of these can be seen in the video, explaining each one would take too long!

I also chose some more classic movies and scenes although I don’t know some of these movies or shows particularly well. For example, I used stuff from Gone With the Wind, I Love Lucy, and the romance between a vampire and a vampire slayer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Other such classics I know better are Jack and Rose from Titanic (love Leo DiCap), Cinderella and her prince (my mom made me a Cinderella costume one Halloween and I loved it so much), and Sandy and Danny from Grease (a proud owner of this DVD). And many others included.

This process took forever because it took a lot of time to try and find the scenes I was looking for and looking through video after video until I found good ones. So now I really understand why nobody (I now see that there is one person who has completed it) has completed this assignment. It took me several days to find everything I wanted. But once I had assembled everything and put all of the pieces together, I think I have a really nice project. Enjoy the romance everyone!

3 STARS

TOTAL STARS: 10/16

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Character/Genre Song Mashup ***

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Character/Genre Song Mashup***

I can only review the example given on the website linked to the assignment. I’m not sure why people haven’t chosen to do this assignment. I watch the example and I really liked the idea of this assignment. To match music to video, is a great Idea. Actually, I didn’t realize how many witch movies there were!!

I chose to do this assignment 1) because for some reason people have been shying away from it.. and I wanted to figure out why! 2) because it looked a little more challenge then the previous assignments I did because it uses video rather than pictures.

I used the song “Cowboys and Angels” by Dustin Lynch because it is currently my favorite song. It also gave me the opportunity to expand my movie bases to cowboy movies and angel movies; which if you can’t think of any trust me there are a million! My story here is that cowboys and angels are an ingrained into our society! It seems that often, like in the song, boys are cowboys and girls and angels. In this video, I challenge that a little because there are numerous video where boy angels dominate. Furthermore I challenge the that love is only between man and women, which is why I open the video with Brokeback Mountain.

Other sources of video include: Angel in America, Cowboys and Aliens, Blackthorn, Rage At Dawn, Toy Story, Gabriel, City of Angels, Michael, Annie Oakley, Angels in the Outfield

The process might have been the cause of why so many people shied away from this assignment. While it was the same technique I’ve used in all my assignments, it was more labor intensive. Firstly,finding all YouTube videos was extremely time consuming. However, once I found them I use PWNYouTube booklet and saved them as video. I upload all of them to Movie Maker. Then, I had to mute the video (each lip individually). Last, I upload music. Once all that was done it was a matter of organizing my videos to make a story. I like the pattern of cowboy/angel/cowboy/angel. Hopefully, the clips bring back some memories, inspires some thought on what is a cowboy/angel (no so stereotypical), and you enjoy just a wonderful song.

#DS106 Our world is full of cowboys and angels kasmoore.com/blog/2012/11/1…

— Kasey Moore (@KaseyMoore6) November 17, 2012

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Character/Genre Song Mashup

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So far 9 people have completed this assignment.
It has 3198 views.

Submitted by: Alan Levine

Find a theme from TV and/or movies (e.g. monsters, cowboys, romance, planes, beaches) and edit a video sequence with a song track from a pop song that matches it. The more short cuts the better!

Inspired by Leerone’s cover of the Donovan song Season of the Witch with famous witch characters from film and television.