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!