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The Gardening

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

Meanwhile back in Camp Magic MacGuffin we are working on video projects and editing. I was eager to try out the Send a Camp Movie to Camp project after speaking with Alan during our radio programs.

As it turns out the Buffalo, NY was the shooting location for a movie titled The Burning and the movie was shot at many Summer Camps in the area including camps belonging to my Boy Scout council. Even more specifically, several of the scenes were shot at camps I was both a camper and camp counselor. I recalled stories about The Burning being told growing up in the Scouts and now I have project to show my appreciation for a little local and Scouting history.

The goal of the project was to invert the personality of the film

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.

So you can see the difference, here is the original trailer taken from YouTube.

Here are the steps I took to invert the personality of the film in the trailer.
  1. Took the clip from YouTube using Easy YouTube Downloader extension in Google Chrome
  2. Created an iMovie ’11 and imported the trailer
  3. Detached and deleted the existing audio track
  4. Recorded a replacement voiceover track using a different theme for the movie while watching the trailer (again and again)
  5. Laid in the new voiceover track from iTunes in the video clip
  6. Laid in a jazzy audio track to play as background music. 
    • This is actually a fellow camp counselor and friend of mine Paul Tynan
  7. Fine tuned the audio tracks with the video
  8. Uploaded the new trailer to YouTube
Here’s the modified trailer with a whole new feeling to the movie.
Pretty cool!
Now, for the touch of local Scouting history. In the opening scene of the movie the boys are skulking around a cabin (about 1’55″ in the clip below), this is lower half of Lakeside Lodge at Camp Scouthaven in Freedom, NY. At that time it would have been where the boats were stored for the waterfront. Here’s the opening scene.
I’ll have to go out to camp and take a picture of this spot and add it to the post later. Enjoy and we hope to see you at gardening camp this Summer.

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Learn 13 Kinds of Practical Jokes at Camp Crystal Lake

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Here is a new ds106 video assignment based on the notion of going to Camp Magic Macguffin for summer camp, Send a Camp Movie to Camp:

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.

Freesound.org “tune-up.wav” by bugfish
http://www.freesound.org/people/bugfish/sounds/135844/

Freesound.org “cellos three thords” by jus
http://www.freesound.org/people/jus/sounds/39557/

Ah camp.

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