I’m not sure why I chose this assignment. I’m not a big concert fan, but I will say after seeing so many TikToks of people at a Harry Styles concert… I want to go. However, you will NEVER catch me paying that much money to see him unless I won the lottery or something. So, this is as close as I’ll ever get. (I also put myself at the very front, because if I were to see him that’s where I’d be, I’m not paying hundreds of dollars for nosebleeds).
This assignment was honestly extremely easy. I took a photo, cut out the background from it. Searched up “Harry Styles concert,” then stuck myself on the photo. And yet again… I used my trusty PicsArt app to do all of this. (It honestly has so many features for being free, so I have to take advantage).
THIS ASSIGNMENT WAS PERFECT – because I have the most sassy animals in the world. For a bit of background, my dog was playing at her doggie friends house… but as soon as food comes around you’re done. She will bark, and bark, and bark until she has what she wants. She could be cussing us out for all we know.
I first took the Live Photo and turned it in a video on my phone. I used GIFMaker to convert the video into a GIF. I’m not sure why the black border is there, I tried multiple softwares to create the GIF but I think based on the size of the video it just won’t go away.
I started looking up short poems, and nothing was calling my name for this assignment. But just as I was able to give up, I remembered the one saying that I always say.
It may not be long, but honestly it has so much meaning. I typically say it in a mean way when people tell me something that is bothering them, but really this saying can mean so many different things. If you’re stressed about something at work, cry a little bit, then get over it. Eventually things will work out.
I think this saying can go really well with how this class is going. I can complain all day long about how much work this is, but in the long run I just need to figure out a way through it. I need to stop focusing on being perfect, and start being more creative.
The process of this assignment was pretty easy. I thought of the saying I wanted to do, and went over to Spotify (not an Apple Music type of person sorry…). I started adding songs to the playlist and now were here.
For this assignment, I kind of wanted to switch it up a bit. I used an older photo, but I knew I had to use one where all my cats were in the same place. I find it funny how each of my cats have a different expression on their face, so it actually makes it look like they’re different photos.
I started by searching for the photo. I knew what photo I wanted to use, so this was very difficult. I used PicsArt to create my collage, and I simply included the photo 7 times to get the right amount of boxes. After that it was all about cropping the subjects to be in their own squares to see if its the same photo.
This assignment was actually very cute, and I’m glad I chose to do one with my cats rather than taking a photo of pointless things. I feel like when I do these assignments, I really want to capture who I am as a person – what better way then focusing on my animals. Because in reality, my animals are my “Joy of Painting.”
I honestly just Googled “Movie Posters” to start this assignment. When I saw The Sound of Music, I knew it was perfect. It’s such a classic movie, and the movie poster could be made funny in so many different ways.
Immediately when I saw her arms reaching out I either wanted to make her extremely muscular, or have something reach up to her. I soon realized it was extremely difficult to photoshop muscular arms on her, so I simply added animals. I started out by finding a high quality movie poster for the movie. I then looked for animals to use in the photo. I used PicsArt to cut out each of the animals. Then I simply overlayed them onto the photo.
I could’ve done something fun with the name of the movie. But I kinda think it’s funny having a bunch of animals on a movie poster that mentions music. It gives the illusion that the animals will be singing in the movie.
This is called pure self-indulgence. I love my puppy, wow, it’s just that I love him enough to take hundred of photos of him. I know I’ll probably regret it later on, but I just love him so much. Even when my day is bad, I still have him staring at me from across the room (like he just did right now before running off to go look out a window). He had a lot of problems when he came to us, most of which he has not had to deal with in a while. Each of these photos I always keep a dozen saves on my computer and the videos have been seen over ten times at least every year. Yeah, it might look choppy, mainly because I was having problems with MovieMaker deciding to warp sound and at one point erasing the sound altogether.
I started with the title screen and added all the video that I could. I wanted to make when the vocals were softer a bunch of photos so you could see him actually standing still, which he does not do that often. He always has a tendency to look away from the camera, unless he’s on the stairs or just got a new haircut (He has to get one next week, but shh, don’t tell him!).
By the end of the song, I realized that the lyrics suddenly faded and the music got hyper and happy, so I decided to have the videos go at 8x. It was like watching him run around chasing someone. Cute, cute, and ultra cute. As the song came to a close I decided to do one last video of him just staring (because he knows he’s the best in the entire universe) and then sits down in his cute Snoopy bed (which we do not own anymore due to things).
The credits roll the same way they did with my lyric video, and I added the last two cards to make sure the question at the beginning of the video answers in words.
This is by far my favorite thing. It might not be my best, but I love my Lucky and anything he does. Even when the world looks bad or I’m depressed, I’m just…I really love him. I just can’t help it.
I mean, what would you expect of me? My love for my dog transcendences the stars in most cases.
I decided to take Hasley’s Castle (Huntsman Version) and turn it into a music video. Firstly, I needed to acquire the song and converted the lyrical video available online into a mp3 using this website. After that, I reluctantly started up Windows MovieMaker and created my opening slides. It consisted of the assignment name and the name of the singer. After pressing “add music” and adding the music, I went to Canva.
Canva is where I make most of my graphics for most of my work. It is very fun to use, has a large range of graphics to choose from, and comes in many forms. I took to the presentation set up and decided to go with a black background while using clipart for certain words.
I’ve been planning for this for some time, actually, and already envisioned how I wanted the lyrics to go. I didn’t want much going on in the background, so I kept to a black background and white words. I clapped my hands a lot in beat to make sure that the images flowed. My process seems very explanatory in the video, with my reuse of slides in order to have the lyrics go along. It’s cute, I think.
Firstly, I opened up Windows MovieMaker and created the title card, naming both the assignment and song I chose. I made sure that they lasted about eleven seconds while the song began.
Afterwards, I worked on the slides in Canva. I made sure to position them in a way to show off the lyrics. I can’t really explain how I went about it, but it just felt right. Sometimes you just have to go along with that feeling and create around it. That’s kind of how I decided to go.
For most of the pictures, I decided to tell a certain story. A young woman who wants to be a revolution. The kingdom is locked up and the old king is cruel. A woman shouldn’t say this and a woman shouldn’t do that. It’s a tale as old as time. She’s got her pride, she’s got her life, and she’s ready to bloody her pretty mouth, even if the world tries to sew it shut.
A good story, I guess.
She gets the castle and the world receives a new queen.
I then added the credit music, which was Hey, Juliet by LMNT and a video in the background that I sped up to 1.5x. I’ll be using the video with my credits for my second video as well. I cut everything off at 5 minutes.
I then downloaded it as a video by clicking “Save Project As” which allows you to convert the file into a multitude of video viewing options.
After watching the video back several times to make sure the timing was right, I uploaded it to Youtube and embed it here.
I decided against doing a snippet, mainly because I couldn’t decide where to cut it, and since the song repeats, I just reused the same slides. It was a fun video to make, including the credits. The credits I have used before and decided to make it my signature this week. In the last video, I will be making this week, I plan to use that as my credits as well.
Your pet cat, dog, turtle, snake [fill in name of pet here] spends a lot of time with you, do you imagine what they are thinking about? Create a series of video sequences of them that show them in contemplative mode, then record over that the narration of what they might be saying to themselves. Pad with an fun opening title, ost to YouTube, and wait for fame and fortune to come your way.
As I mentioned in one of my Week 1 Posts (wow, forever ago!), I have a gorgeous, charming dog named Arthur. To be honest, I chose this assignment partly because it will be somewhat easy for me…I’m always imagining what Arthur is really thinking. In fact, its a source of endless frustration for me that Arthur refuses to learn to talk, so me and my parents will habitually say out loud what we think Arthur is thinking when no one is around. Some families bond over camping or dinner or shared interests…we bond over narrating my dog’s thoughts. Because that’s totally not weird.
F+or 4.5 stars, I did the Narrative Ambiance assignment, which asked us to:
Take a favorite poem, inspiring quote or passage from a book (or even a movie monologue, if you like!) and record yourself reading it. Then set it to original video you’ve recorded with some kind of music or sound effect in the background. The final video should be at least a minute long.
The goal of this assignment is to tell a story that evokes a specific mood–sadness, joy, hope, anger, fear, peace, wonder–and to do so not only through the literal meaning of whatever you choose to read, but through your use of original video and music or sound effects. Be creative! There’s a ton of different ways to interpret this assignment. When you write your blog post about it, tell us what mood or feeling you wanted to convey, what you want the viewer to take away from your video, and how successful you feel you were.
It should be fairly obvious why I chose this assignment: I love reading and writing. I decided to read one of my favorite quotes. Its by author Jack Kerouac. I’ve only ever read his novel On the Road, his most popular work. Its a little strange, to say the least, but a great read; its considered a “modern” (that is, the 20th century or contemporary sense of modern) classic. This quote, on the other hand, comes from Lonesome Traveler, a collection of short stories he authored based on “a compilation of Kerouac’s journal entries about traveling” according to Wikipedia. I actually found it on Pinterest, of all places.
One of these days I’m going to read Lonesome Travelerthough–like Kerouac’s other works, I connect to the mixture of alienation, wanderlust, and desire for freedom that living in the impersonal modern world leaves me with. One day I’m going to travel the world just like he did and hopefully write something at least a fraction as great as his works…But first I’m going to do this assignment.
For this assignment I used Windows Movie Maker, which is loaded onto most Windows computers. I’m sure Mac has a similar program, but I don’t know anything about it, so the tutorial on this assignment is really only going to be helpful to show you how I did things.
First, I hit Title to add a title. The little window entitled Add title appears when you mouse over the button.
I came up with my weird-sounding title from an interesting term I found that means:
It doesn’t fully describe the mood I’m trying to capture, but it does go with the ambiance. I wanted the aesthetic of On the Roadand the nomadic visions of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, but a little gentler–essentially the aesthetic of the story I want to write one day.
To adjust the duration of each piece, you just go to the tab called Edit to adjust as follows:
I also added credits for my video by choosing from the different options for credits. At this point I also found myself wanting to adjust the text with the text editor, which comes up whenever you click on the text box on the slide. Experiment with different fonts, colors, sizes, transitions, lengths…I did ultimately settle for simpler stuff, but there’s a lot you can do with this software.
I put a music track over the opening credits.
Then I added my video via Add Videos and photos. Its a video I filmed a while back while on vacation, available here on YouTube as below.
It seemed appropriately peaceful and serene, but also a little lonely and dull, just right for the idea I wanted to convey.
To add the words narrating my video, I clicked on Record Narration.
This is a story about my character, Shadow. He is out for the night hunting for things to take, he finds a jewelry store a runs around to make sure the coast is clear. He notices the doorknob is old and jiggles it open. The alarm goes off, he starts to break the showcases. Not knowing the police station is close by he hears the police cars approach. He tries to get a few more things before they arrive. Before he knows it the cops have him surrounded, he is a goner. Shadow now gets to spend another night in the slammer, its like his second home at this point.
