The assignment inanimate motion is what I like to call clay-mation without the clay. This was by far the hardest to do just because I could not get these rubber person thingy to stand up -_- I must say if I do this again I would not have used that thing but it fit perfectly into with my story I was going to tell. All I did was take a bunch of pictures and then put them all together on windows movie maker. I think that music would have been nice but I thought that it would have been distracting in this case because I wanted the audience to focus on what was happening and infer the story line from there. My story that I was thinking about was there was a little ducky that got lost and then its owner was looking for him they found each other and then flew off together happily ever after!

For my fourth video assignment this week I did lip synch your favorite song which was worth two stars. The rules for this assignment were to pick a verse of a song and do a lip synch for it.

As soon as I saw this assignment I was quite excited for it.  I sing along to songs in my car like a crazy and me and my sisters have been know to make up hand motions to a couple too many songs.  I got help from my friend Mia on this assignment.  I had some serious computer issues this week so she let me record some stuff on her computer and since she was here she decided to go ahead and be in my video as well.

We picked the song We are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift to do our lip synch too.  We are both kind of obsessed with Taylor (which I am sure you can tell I am if you watch any of my videos this week) so this was an easy choice for us.

To make this video we simply played the song while we recorded ourselves lip synching along in iMovie.  Weirdly enough we didn’t really feel all that silly doing it and had a fun time making ourselves look crazy.  I had to cut the beginning and end of our videos to make it so that only the song was apart of the video.  We had a good amount of giggling before and after in the originally copy.

Here is our lip synch.  Enjoy!

Eleven stars down and five to go!

The next assignment I chose for the 2 weeks of video was the Return to the Silent Era assignment from the assignment bank.

I started the pre-production for this assignment a couple of weeks ago, so it wasn’t hard to put all the pieces together in the two weeks we had.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow

I chose Django: Unchained because I felt like it could transfer easily to a silent film–since it’s a western style film and all. It was also pretty funny for me to think of a movie having the main character as a black bounty hunter killing white people during the silent film era. I’m sure that would have gone over SUPER well.

So first I found the trailer that had the least bit of talking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow

I removed all the “modern” stuff like the green preview screen and the text that is throughout the trailer. Then I used title cards I found from this website.

I found a couple of fonts that I liked on Dafont.com.

This font is used for most of the cards in the video.

This one was only used on the last card for the title of the movie.

I made each card in Adobe Photoshop then transferred the PNGs to Premiere Pro. With the cards and clips that I needed, I now only had to find some music. This was by far the hardest part. Finding music that not only sounded Silent Movie-ish yet still matched the clips…?

I eventually found some on Incompetech.com. I used “Dark Hallway,” “Comic Plodding,” “Villainous Treachery,” and “Iron Horse.”

Like I said in my pre-production blog post, I used a tutorial for After Effects to create a vintage feel to the clip.

Here’s a couple screenshots of my work.

As you can see, I had to find a way to repeat the film overlay that created a “distressed” look to the clip. I couldn’t figure out a way to loop it, so I figured it would just be easier to repeat it until the end of the trailer.

After watching this new trailer back, I realized that it may be interesting to discuss with my Civil War in American Memory class about how the film would be received in the silent film era. Like I said before, it would be quite a provocative and controversial subject to see a black man killing white people–and getting away with it–in the early 20th century.

Overall, I’m incredibly proud of this trailer. I thought this one would be one of the assignments that would be a throwaway video (we all have those! Don’t deny it!). However, after working on it and watching it back, I think it’s pretty awesome.