For this remix, I wanted to tell more of my final project story, expand on what I did in set 2 video 2 | Ted Lewis and Permissions, and figure out more of what is happening. So when I saw this remix, it just fit! But instead of one extra character, I added two for the price of one, but just their voices.
To make this, I wrote out a script, recorded the lines, and spliced them all together in iMovie. It was pretty simple, which was a fantastic and much need break from the more intense mash-ups I have done this week.
Again, I might have gone a little off-book, but this week was for video, not writing. I chose this assignment because I wanted to do something that related to the story that I want to do for my final project, something to help me uncover more of what is going on.
I started with the idea of this magic and filmed the video. Because I didn’t have a tripod I hung my camera from the bottom of my bed (it’s lofted) with yarn to get the correct perspective.
I recorded the audio and mixed it together, adding all of the glitches and static over it. I am getting very good at manually making glitches, they seem to be a re-occurring theme.
Below is a sneak peek of what my iMove looks like, this is the most I could get to fit on one screen, but there are still nine more layers of audio and two minutes of film that go off the page.
The story I was going for, more like the story I am beginning, was someone explaining how to do magic in a video format. Later I want to expand on this, because the back story is that there is a war on magic happening and the recorder of this video knows that magic is about to be destroyed. At least for now. So he is trying to preserve the magic so that people in the future can learn it. The song at the beginning is a cover-up. I plan to do an assignment later with two people discovering this and it will be their reactions to it and the story continuing on in that way.
“Music video are only the best way to listen to your favorite song because it give you the added visual dimension. Have you ever listen to a song and said ” oh this would be great with such-in-such movie”? Your task is to use video clips, NOT still shots, to create a music video for any song. Be creative!”
Maybe this video is obvious. A song about weddings and Fine China put over footage that has fine china and wedding imagery in it, not the hardest connection to make. But for me, this scene and this song are put in the same drawer in my brain. To pull one out is to at least see the other.
Plus I love pirates.
So I found some scenes and cut them up. Mainly I cut out all of the shots of british people in the wedding scene, and then found all of the dress-floating-in-water scenes. All I want to see is Keira Knightley. She’s all I want on screen.
photo of my workspace^
Bit of a rambley fact, I had no idea how I wanted to end it. And I was just looking for the scene where the wedding dress was floating in water and saw that it faded into Keira Knightley’s face. Once I saw the scene following that transition, I was like ‘yes, this is it’. And that was how I decided to end it.
“This was inspired from the 30 second documentary assignment. The object is to make a documentary showing how to do something. Wether that’s how to make something, what your/a job is like, trying something new, showing yourself doing something you are terrible at or even really good at.”
True to the assignment, this video has no sound. However, the recommended way to watch it is to just listen to whatever your favorite song at the moment is.
This assignment kind of chose me. I got this skirt over the weekend and was just about to place the first pins before I realized this would be a great mini-doc.
There was quite a bit of trickiness in this. I had limited spaces to film, so I had to put up that sheet out of necessity, not just for aesthetics. It was also a little weird to get the sewing shots. If you saw my setup, you probably laugh but give props for creativity. I had a book standing up on the desk and my phone laid on top of it, hanging off just enough to see the project below. It was interesting to sew while trying to stay in the frame. It didn’t always happen…
my iMove workstation ^
I was very happy with the subtitles. Usually, I do not like the iMovie options, but the two-tone one is quite nice. I did have fun with the ends credits… You gotta make every part of the video interesting! If there was one thing I’d do differently though, it would be to shout out Simply To Go for being the main supplier of Chex Mix.
“Create a short documentary, no more than 20 minutes in length. Make it on any topic of your choosing! Be sure to cite your sources, though! Make it on anything that interests: history, sports, music, movies, etc. Just make it informative and engaging!”
So just to start off, I did make the documentary less than 10 minutes, but I have no sources besides my brain.
So this was a little bit of a stretch. Both of this assignment and me. This assignment was meant for documentaries about real things, but I made it for the event that happened in my Character Point of View Video. Cause something weird happened, and people are trying to figure out what. That’s close enough to a documentary, right?
I have never quite done something like this before, with so much acting on camera. And boy was it weird. Not only to do but to watch back again and again as I edited it.
I will say though, as silly and bad and cringe as this is, I am very proud of it. I had a vision that, at the time, seemed impossible. There were times when I thought that I’d back out and do a different assignment, but I stuck to the story and made it work. So let me walk you through everything I did to make this awful thing that I am fiercely proud of.
I wrote the script and revised it twice. (1,456 words total)
I put up that background screen, which took longer than you might think.
I brushed out that wig.
I dressed up in four different costumes and acted my heart out on zoom to get the visual recordings.
I voice acted the interviewer and also SA Marvin.
Then I edited it all together on iMove. Cut out my fumbles and added in the audio, as well as sound effects for the door, and visual effects for the glitch things. I would pay good money for a glitch feature on iMovie, but alas. All of my glitches are hand-crafted.
I wore masks cause not only did it hide some of my face which was nice, both for my own peace of mind and also less acting pressure, but it differentiated the characters. At least I think so. It is the same kind of mask, which I wore because I find that anything other than a medical one muffles the voice too much. Maybe it didn’t help. I also tried my best to make my voice sound different for all the characters, and added some effects to try and help with that, but I don’t know how effective that was. It all kind of sounds the same to me. But then again, I have been practically breathing this project for the past few days.
So now you know what happened on Monday, March the 31st.
“For this assignment, take a video no longer than 90 seconds from the point of view of your character. Make sure to weave it into the story you are telling and include actions/materials that your character would use. Also, you could edit it in iMovie and add music.”
So this is just what the assignment said. A 90-second point of view of one of the characters from what I think will be my final project. I filmed this in our very own UMW library and edited it on iMovie. Please do not judge the effects too harshly, iMovie does not have a lot of ‘magical effects emanating from a book’ features, so I tried my best.
The sound is from an earlier project of mine, a bit of the Idea Outline Post, specifically the audio portion. When I plugged it in here, it actually worked surprisingly well. I was very pleased it didn’t take too much tinkering to figure out.
The goal of this video was to be intriguing and slightly befuddling, but fear not, there are some form of answers.
“Make a collage of something growing up, or growing bigger. Now this takes some time-you must have some video footage of the object, person, pet, etc. growing older. It can be a stop motion of a plant, or if you have puppy pictures and now a full sized dog, put them all together and make a collage of it! Be creative!”
So when I saw this assignment, I immediately knew what I would do for it. I have been collecting videos and photos of myself through my transition and this seemed like a good time to put together a little ‘here’s how it’s going so far’ type of video. I am only seven weeks in, but I didn’t realize how much my voice really changed until I made this video.
I just put the clips together on iMove, added in some commentary, and it was good to go. I wanted to add music, but I didn’t want to obscure my voice, so it’s a little dry in the audio effect department, but I think the subtitles make up for it.
To be fair, I loved this assignment when I did it, so this isn’t so much a revision as it is a part 2. I wanted to make a completely new second cooking video, but honestly, there is not much I can make in my dorm room that isn’t just like cheese on crackers. The peanut butter apples were basic enough. And this was supposed to be a remix. So I used the same footage.
In the first assignment write-up, I explained that I had originally wanted to do a backward but played forewards video so that it was extra weird, but I had to scrap the idea cause it was too confusing (obviously). But this time I could do it! This could be like a monster’s rebuttal to the original where they de-create the snack. And so this was born. Hats off to iMovie and google doc image options.
Fun tidbit, if the music sounds strange, it is because I took the same music from the last video and played it backward. Thought it would fit well and also tie into the original.
So I might have gone a little of the beaten path with this assignment, but blame Bob Ross. As things began to move away from the source material, my only thought was “Let’s get a little crazy,” which is something a very smart man said. That really is what this assignment turned out to be. I leaned into the story as it happened and let it unfold as it wanted to.
“We all know those cooking shows where the TV chef is usually making something that sounds delicious, but by the time we get all the ingredients and actually make the thing they made, it’s not as good as we thought it would be? Or how about those times that you have grand plans for a recipe or meal, but it turns south quickly? What if cooking shows were realistic, and showed how not everything goes as planned, or is fantastic as we want it to be? For this assignment, make a cooking show or highlight a recipe that you can make that is not TV chef worthy, but good enough to eat, and if you’re lucky, enjoy.”
Well, to start this assignment, I was slightly confined by what foods I could make in my dorm room, and also what foods I could make while low on ingredients. Peanut butter apples were kinda my best (and only) option, and perfect because I wanted a snack! I actually ate it while I edited the video. (insert chef’s kiss here, delicious) I first wanted to try and make the snack backward, then play the video forewards so it would look very strange. Sort of like the red room in Twin Peaks where the characters talk backward, but then the video is played backward so it sounds correct.
^The red room
If that sounds confusing, that’s because it is and I could not find a way to make it work with this cooking video. So I thought I would have to settle for normalcy. It wasn’t until after I filmed the footage that I thought about making it look old, like an early film reel. Then, I thought about the first scene of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. If you haven’t seen it, watch it, there is a moose involved and it is very funny.
Who said introductory credits had to be boring?
So I started channeling that and once I wrote the subtitle for ‘spending the day in the countryside’, I thought “What strange thing could you do with this food in Ye Olden Days?” Then the monsters popped in. It was a risk, I’ll admit. Trying to be funny in video format is not something I excel at, but then I thought of the wise words of the Patron Saint of Ds106: “What the heck, let’s get crazy.” So I got crazy and went with it. It was kind of scary doing something so new, and I almost scrapped it, but I tried to take Bob Ross’s words to heart and just keep going. I guess you can be the judge of how successful it was. I had fun making it, so I am happy.
^Can we get these to commemorate the class?
I filmed the video on my phone using a state-of-the-art tripod made out of an old Ikea box. Then I used iMovie to edit the video. I wasn’t super happy with the subtitle options that the program had, so I made my own. I found the background image of old-timey subtitles and put it on a google doc.
The blank subtitle card
Then I just put the words on top of it and took a screenshot for every subtitle card. I had to redo them a lot cause I made some formatting and spelling mistakes, but it worked.
A deleted card, I fixed it so that the words were more centered.
I then used the ‘Silent Era’ clip filter on everything. I sped up the video clips because frankly they were kind of slow and it worked with the black-and-white vibe. For the finishing touch, I googled “Upbeat Orchestral Music” and picked something that I thought fit.
I chose Viola Concerto in G Major
Strive to be like the cat above, very cool and also asleep.
