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!
