I am a very random person. I love saying random things at random times, just because its funny. When I saw this assignment I instantly became excited because I had a chance to be random. For once in my life, I can use my randomness for something productive.
I chose 10 words off of the top of my head. I chose to words, MAN, FUNNY, CHEERLEADER, LOVE, ALSO, PURPLE, SING, MUSIC, HAIRY, UGLY. After I had chosen my words, I tried my hardest to make a sentence that made sense, but it was hard. This assignment was overall easy to do. These are the steps to how I created this project.
1. I googled my 10 words on Google images
2. Saved the images to my computer
3. Opened up Windows Movie Maker
4. Imported the 10 pictures in
5. Dragged each word separately, and placed it into the timeline
6. made the pictures smaller, so they would flow faster, yet smoothly.
7. Imported the instrumental version of “Disturbia ” – Rihanna
8. Dragged the song onto the timeline under the pictures
9. Made the song fade towards the end
10. Matched the music to the pictures
And that was the whole assignment, it took me about 10-15 minutes to do and it was fun as well. I hope you enjoyed it.
As I was looking over the list, I came across the film Amelie and thought that might be a good one to “read”. I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it but it was so many years ago that I would have to find it and watch it again before completing this assignment. Instead I started looking at the other visual assignments that I could do and I recalled a mash-up I had seen quite a while back that combined the Toy Story 3 and Inception trailers. I started to wonder if Inception would be a good movie to read – I had also really enjoyed that one when I saw it. Of course, that made me want to try my own mash-up of Amelie and Inception. So, I found the trailers for both, downloaded the sound and video from YouTube with my Firefox add-on and combined them in iMovie.
This might fit video assignment #463 – Watching Movies with the Stereo On: Like when you have a movie playing on TV without the sound and you’ve got the stereo on at the same time. Take a clip from a movie, remove the audio, and add audio from a song or radio show that, somehow, kind of fits.
I’ll tackle a “proper” video assignment later this week with more original content…
It’s hot. It’s been hot all week, and I’ve been thinking about The Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun.”
The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is ‘doomed,’ because the people you’ve just seen have been handed a death sentence.
Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel.
If you’d like to view the episode in its entirety, do it:
Last night I started working on video assignment #539. I generated the random words and found some of the pictures through Google Images. I had some idea of where the story was going to go. I went to bed. I sat down with it again tonight, and the tale veered in a different direction.
In “Midnight Sun,” civilization faces its last days. The story below focuses on a doomed relationship. What has happened? Has the couple fallen into different rotations? Has the affinity for a crappy band taken its toll? Maybe the constant tallying of mistakes has worn thin. Or maybe it’s just the damn heat.
The opening of the project was stolen from this tweet which appeared in my stream this afternoon:
Truth "@RandallDoetzer: I used to live in Richmond, now I just live on the sun."— Russell (@FarmerRussell) July 07, 2012
Not only is this a bastardization of video assignment 457, but it’s also kind of a cheat since I did this video a handful of years ago. But I’m not a student, and I’m not working for a grade, so I get to do what I want to do.
The rules guidelines for video assignment #457 read like this:
Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.
Here’s my interpretation:
Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.
I met some of the criteria.
Anyways… Battlemaster is a Richmond black metal band. They are wonderful. Some of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet. Back in 2007 they put out Warthirsting & Winterbound, which included the song, “This Mead Is Making Me Warlike.” When played live, this song really rallied the audience. It was met with singing, the raising of PBR cans in the air, and sometimes the tossing of said PBR cans.
I took the song and mixed it with public domain footage from Archive.org. I haven’t looked at this video in years. The assortment of clips is truly, truly bizarre. So here we go:
Thanks, DS106, for making me pull this project off the shelf.
Take one of the movies on the list of movies with camp themes, find a trailer for it, and re-edit the audio to completely change the plot- e.g. make a horror movie turn into a comedy, or make a romantic movie seem like a spooky movie.
Send a camp movie to personality inversion camp!
I went easy, and selected the trailer for the original Friday the 13th, made in 1980, the first home of Camp Crystal Lake
I locked into this when it came out, I was still in high school, and could have easily been one of those wide eyed teens- one of which is a really young Kevin Bacon. Yeah, Jason rises out of the lake and takes his gross revenge, and it set in motion an entire industry of followups. I vividly recall nearly jumping out of my seat in the theater during the first one, maybe it was the Blair Witch Project of its time.
What does the fascination with horror movies say about us? It can be said it is a safer approach to playing out things in fictional form that are much worse than the horrors we witness (or ignore) in life? We could, and people do, speculate for eons.
So for my inversion of the movie, I watched the 13 countdowns of the original trailer, and wondered what if Camp Crystal Lake was the place to go to learn how to play practical jokes? A ha ha ha funny place.
This was pretty much a one take improv- I downloaded the youtube version of the trailer as an MP4, and opened it in iMovie. I used the Edit -> Mute Clip command to neutralize the audio of the original (you can also do a detach audio and then delete that track, but sometimes its better to just mute the original if you are going to re-do the whole thing. I then used the record over features to overlay my own dialogue, which you can tell is a one take. I had the most fun wit nod to the Oracle of Kevin Bacon phenomena.
To add some flair, I imported a few audio clips from Freesounds, a goofy orchestra track and a track of cellos to make it sound concertic.
I’m a librarian. You probably guessed that. We librarians are a dedicated bunch and tend to be defensive about what we do. You would be too if you were constantly asked, “Why do I need a librarian when there’s Google.” Yeah. Screw you, buddy.
The librarians are from Ghostbusters, Party Girl (Parker Posey), The Matrix (Marcus Chong), Desk Set (Katharine Hepburn and Joan Blondell), and The Station Agent (Michelle Williams). The music is “Marian the Librarian” from The Music Man.
I’ve heard it argued that though Tank is not actually called a librarian in The Matrix, but he does a lot of librarian-ish work. So there you go. I also think the scene is representative of the high-tech world in which librarians work (and dominate thank you very much).
Over the next few weeks, I’d like to look at some of my favorite crime films. Something about cops and robbers grabs me. Maybe it’s the loyalty and betrayal – or the chess match between good guys and bad guys racing to figure out where all the pieces fit before their counterparts do. Emotional and tactical thinking. Passion and prowess. Great directors and performances. Romanticizing childhood. The works.
For my Return to the Silent Era assignment, I decided to rework a trailer for Heat, which I watched three times in the theater when it came out. Since then I’ve watched it a kajillion times on VHS and DVD. Danny Trejo, Jeremy Piven, and Henry Rollins in one film! Hometown star Amy Brenneman!
Then, to begin producing the silent era trailer, I searched the Creative Commons pool on Flickr for a card I could use for titles, dialogue, and credits. I found this card and painted over its text in Acorn.
Next, I watched the trailer a few times to transcribe the dialogue and narration.
After that, I imported the trailer into iMovie and began to work on editing it.
It was a shame to strip out the soundtrack and dialogue. The trailer, like the film, is a gem of both audio and visual editing, pacing, and story-telling. I love the soundtrack, including Moby’s contributions. To preserve some of that pacing, I tried to edit the trailer in such a way that my title, credit, and dialogue cards occupied splits where new dialogue or dramatic beats existed in the original trailer.
After I stripped out the sound, I made the clip black and white. Then I exported it.
Next, I made my title, credit, and dialogue cards in Acorn. I edited out some lines from the original trailer. I also amended or otherwise edited some of the dialogue I used so that it would fit legibly on a card and not take too long to read. I used the STFangSong font because its serif has more curves than corners, like the border embellishment of the cards I used for text.
I opened iMovie again, imported the black and white version of the trailer, and edited in my cards. I made a new card for Regency because its original logo had some animation on it. I left the first Warner Bros. credit alone because it’s a static painting of an iconic trademark; it isn’t so jarringly modern as an animated logo.
After I worked in my cards, I exported the movie again. Then I imported that file back into iMovie. With every new import, I deleted older clips from the editing box in iMovie, but kept them inside the project library for reference so that I could, say, skim the original trailer to see who said what when.
I used the film grain effect in iMovie to age and deform the black and white trailer.
Then I searched freesound.org for piano riffs to use in the trailer. I wanted something elegiac that sounded unproduced (like a real piano) and that looped like Moby’s theme in the trailer. I found this clip, which had a tinny sound to it, almost as if it had been recorded and played-back on early, low quality audio equipment, or as if it had suffered over time from multiple-transfers to new audio formats on its way into my trailer. I opened Garage Band and played around with layering this loop with other samples from freesound.org, but I couldn’t make anything that wasn’t way too distracting. Ultimately, I just looped my sample for the length of the trailer. However, I wouldn’t mind trying to score it sometime in the future using Garage Band and a Korg Nano Key or something.
Finally, I exported the grainy, piano-looped silent era trailer, uploaded it, and shared it here.
In watching it again (and again and again as I worked), I think I could have edited out everyone but Pacino and De Niro. I suspect the narrative of this silent era trailer would have worked better in terms of pacing if it had focused exclusively on the main characters and the core dynamic of their relationship with one another. As it is, the silent era trailer feels a little long to me, but that might also be a function of the music I chose or something else that will hit me later.
How it was created…
1. I collected some of my favorite songs that spoke the words I NEVER could say.
2. I edited the parts of the songs I wanted and simply placed them in the selected boxes.
3. I then uploaded the pictures where my facial expressions or body language reinforced the words of the song.
4. I put those images into the images box
5. I edited the music so that it the pictures and lyrics matched and my video was created.
6. Uploaded it to Youtube and embedded the code onto my blogging site.
Before I had told you all that I love music. Sometimes instead of me telling someone exactly how I feel, I’d just tell them to listen to a song. I am a very open person, but if I feel as if someone does not understanding me, I become discouraged. Music is my outlet. Listen to the songs and pay attention to the pictures, it tells you A LOT about me.
Here’s the track list(in order) and the YouTube link , if you hear a song that you like and you want to listen.. Cry – Tynisha Keli
On June 6, 2012 millions watched the transit of Venus across the sun. While millions watched, many others missed this rare celestial phenomenon. Some people missed it because they were looking the wrong way or they live on the wrong side of the planet. Others missed out simply because the didn’t give a hoot, or they were nestled deep underground tunneling through their mine craft worlds.
Whatever the reason, if you missed it, here is a re-enactment based on detailed eyewitness accounts.
I don’t know which ds106 assignment this really belongs under. I used Swede a Scene even though this is an animated gif, not a video.
I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one.
Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative!
Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here…
I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist posteras well as a Macguffin. It’s just a classic on many fronts, and not just for Paul Newman’s larger than life performance, but many others in the mix. “A night in the box”?
I really fumbled around with this in Adobe After Affects. I swore I had the full version on my old Mac, since I had the CSS 5 full suite, but apparently in some fit of file cleaning, I sapped some key files, and it would not load. So I went for the student approach, the 30 day trial run.
While I ought to give a full blown process run down. I watched a few tutorials, and got the key tip on control scrubbing the audio to match the word entrance. After Effects is not for the feint of software. There are so many settings, effects (duh) and ways you can put key frames and ween things. I did not get as far as playing with the typing effects or the camera effects, so it was pretty much popping the words up in sync with the sound. I did a few position tweens, some with a box blur effect.
It was alos a fumble fest with rendering it. But I bulled through it, and now have some awareness of when I might reach for this large hammer again.
Some men you just can’t reach.
Maybe because they are fiddling with key frames or lost in renderland.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
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