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!