Just last week, my ds106 students applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read Movies for their weekly assignment. One of my students was first in my network to share the sad news that Ebert passed away today

@cogdog on a completely random note, just saw this article about robert ebert! movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-ta…#ds106 #moviecritic

— micaela (@mmbutlerr) April 3, 2013

What a better way to honor his contributions that a ds106 assignment (well there are likely much better ways), but here you go, Thumbs Up For Ebert:

Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky.

For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place him inside one of the movies he loved or hated. Or mash him up, Do anything to show some respect for Ebert’s devotion to not only appreciating film but teaching others.

Ironically, I saw today also a note that today marked 100 years since blues legend McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, was born. I looked for a connection between the two, and ended up with a mix of “Got My Mojo Working” and some clips of Ebert sparring with Gene Siskel:

I started with the song list for Muddy Waters, found a few in YouTube, landing eventually on a live 1973 performance of Got My Mojo Working– “Mojo” is such a gritty and suggestive word, coming from an African custom of a magic charm represented by objects in a bag — ” it is said to drive away evil spirits, keep good luck in the household, manipulate a fortune, and lure and persuade lovers.”

The song was a huge hit for Muddy Waters in the mid 1950s, listed in the top 500 all time songs by Rolling Stone, and has a long list of covers- though it was written by Preston Foster and originally recorded by Ann Cole and there was some copyright spats there. The courts stepped in and said Mojo was un-copyrightable:

MOJO is a commonplace part of the rhetoric of the culture of a substantial portion of the American people. As a figure of speech, the concept of having, or not having, one’s MOJO working is not something in which any one person could assert originality, or establish a proprietary right.

Kind of interesting to think about judges debating the merits of “one’s MOJO working”.

The song is more of a reference to the lack of the Mojo’s ability to work over the charm of a lover, but I thought of the way Ebert and Siskel went at each other, when they disagreed. I found many clips of this, and used ones from a set of outtakes and a bit of their interchange when they reviewed Jaws.

In iMovie, I dropped the Ebert clips on top of the music track, with the advanced features on using the Cutaway edit, essentially adding those clips on a new track. I edited the audio properties on these clips to duck other audio. And I added a few title bits, using the same effect (soft edge) and font.

Click to see full size

For the last title sequence, I grabbed again the first 15 seconds of the video, then detached the audio to slide under the closing title sequence (and deleted the video part of the music). The audio properties were edited for a manual 2 second fadeout.

Gonna miss that mojo all around.

What is going on here at CogDOGBlog, taking the side of the cat? But you see, the way I saw this video, the poor cat was just trying o sleep at that Lil Tramp kept messing him up:

This is an example for my ds106 students of this week’s video assignment. Here’s the deal- in weeks 7-8 while we were working in audio my students were charged with generating 30 seconds of foley sound for the action in a segment of a clip of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus. They tagged their clips in SoundCLoud to match the section of audio (well except for the last section, cause the teacher had a typo in the original lesson).

The assignment for this week is to use those FOley segments and the original clip to make a new story. In my story, What’s a Cat Gotta Do to Sleep Around Here? it’s is from the lion’s perspective, who just wants to sleep to rest for the show, but he keeps getting disturbed by The Little Tramp who bumbles around the Lion’s cage, making noise, getting the dog to bark. Poor cat, just wants to snooze.

The sounds I used were:

• https://soundcloud.com/stefanie-jeske/chaplin-foley by Stefanie Jeske
• https://soundcloud.com/mbutlerr/foley-challenge by Micaela
• https://soundcloud.com/dylangott1/chaplin by Dylan
• https://soundcloud.com/klamb912/foley-sounds by Kristen
• https://soundcloud.com/cwyrough/chaplin-foley by Cole (dude, you need to enable the downloads on your clip! I had to Hijack the sound to record it)

I grabbed this photo of Emma for my opening title sequence, found in compfight searching flickr creative commons based on “grumpy cat”.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Bohman.

The music is from the awesome incompetech royalty free music site, I look edin the “agressive” category, choosing a track that was a bit more modern than the original clip — Take the Lead by Kevin MacLeod licensed under a CC Attribution 3.0.

Here is a screen shot of my iMovie project:

Click to see the full sized image!

I dragged and dropped each audio file under the section I wanted it to appear at, moved it to try and match the action. The purple is a bit of extra dialogue to fill what was missing. The “Take the Lead” track stretches across the entire project (I used it twice to extend the end). For each of the other audios, I used the audio option to “duck” the sound track beneath it. It ends with credits, i brought in the extra graphcis using the picture in a picture option (you get these by enabling the advanced options).

I’ll probably run through this agaiin during Thursday’s Open Lab session, 9pm EST in Google Hangout.

That’s a wrap! Shhhhh, let the big cat sleep, willya?

In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment:

Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don’t they? So take a video of something in your life–someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever–and reverse it!

They not only look weird, but they sound weird.

I used the “No Place Like Home” clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of “Cartoon” and Audio effect of “Echo”, all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel:

Just keep repeating that, and you might go back to Oz, Dorothy.

We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January.

The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013).

My focus has been on our sections here at UMW, but we have a good amount of activity as well with Michael Branson Smith’s York College/CUNY section plus Ryan Rish’s class and Darren Crovitz’s class at Kennesaw State University.

Yet I cannot help but notice the fall off among our open online participants. Where have they gone?

modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by ShuttrKing|KT: http://flickr.com/photos/xtrah/4853491803/

From the bits I scan, I can see Emily Strong has been one of the most active in doing assignments, and a few more in the mix, like Abigal Wellman, Sandy Brown Jenson makes stories all the time, John Johnson regularly riffs in, Leigh is doing bits of both phonar and ds106, Ben Rimes jumps in with assignments and nudges me about Daily Create stuff, Scottlo is audio casting his life in Saudi Arabia heck even Tom Woodward eeks out a GIF or a remix now and then… okay as I dig I see a steady current. This is good. Maybe more than I thought.

But it’s nothing like that first year and many of the people who were most active are doing other things.

Now if regular CogDogBlog barking snarling fashion, I might be calling out people, asking “what is #4life”?. Shaming. But that is in no way my intent. And if anyone apologizes I might come over to your house and chew up your shoes or lift my leg on your couch.

If I were not teaching ds106, I would guess my amount of ds106 activity would be low. Once you have gone through the intoxicating round, its naturally to move on, to return on occasion. Like that weird uncle. Maybe not.

But we’ve not seen too many people new join in. And I could guess from here til Tuesday:

• People are participating in peripheral ways, like doing Daily Creates or ds106 radio. This is good, Unlike any other MOOC, c or x, in ds106, you do not “fall behind” if you miss a few elluminated lectures or don;t do the weekly homework. The door to entry/exit is completely in your hands, and coming and going happens without penalty.
• Maybe its the lack of Jim Groom who is onto amazing work with his hard boiled class. Jim would be the last to claim his presence makes ds106, but he is a draw. Heck its why I came to it.
• It’s messy. If you have heard of ds1206, when you get to the site, it’s not even clear how or what to do. You are hit with a firehose. I’ve tried to organize an intro for open participants but I bet its not clear what to do. I have plans to work on this. More than that, after all the teaching that has been done, we have a rather extensive set of resources, recorded videos, various approaches to the assignments. My goal is organize them into a buffet type syllabus so that an open participant could pick and choose a path through the ds106 content.

I may have to repeat myself, this is no slap against all the people who freely played, shared, contributed in ds106 before. With the intensity of the load of following and mentoring 25 students, each blogging several times a week, it gets tobe a challenge to give attention to other work in the community. And while the class will go on regardless, ds106 is better for having the larger cloud of activity, so I am invested in finding ways to make it easier for people to craft their own ds106 experience, and get hooked on the kool-aid.

Hopefully it does not go down like this…

I could not resist doing a voiceover for the classic bit of Ben Stein improv — wait a minute, this is a ds106 assignment, redub the audio

Take a classic movie (or heck any movie you like), and rescript the audio of a key scene. You will want to re-write the lines to change the meaning or intent of the scene, delete the original audio, and record your own (this can be done many ways, voiceover in iMovie, recording the audio and editing the track in any other movie editor).

I already had this clip, so I imported it into iMovie, and muted the original audio. To get my own dub, I played the video on low volume (so I could try and track the rhythm) and recorded my own voice over in Audacity, reading the content of the ds106 Open Participant web page.

And woah, I totally forgot, when editing an audio track in iMovie, you have some effects available, so for the main track, I dropped mine a pitch

and for the closing credits, I took the “Anyone Anyone” audio (detached the sound from the video of the original), and used the echo audio effect.

I like that, I go on a ramble about ds106 and I end up doing an assignment.

I still dig it. You?

My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado).

I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily Creates in a row, and then weave together in a blog post, make something out of it, and leave a comment on my original post.

THERE IS NO SLACKING OFF!

I decided to enlist the help of five tough guys, and at the same time complete a ds106 video assignment, One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds. Created by Michael Branson Smith, this is one of the more popular assignments, with over 50 examples listed:

Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies. Check out an example here:

I got lax on the five seconds, but these guys are tough and they will be in your face if you get soft about this challenge:

Pay close attention to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman:

“You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you [to be creative]” – just by doing 7 days in a row of The Daily Create

The Five movies are:

• Kids in the Hall Brain Candy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVPn14A1msc
• An Officer and a Gentleman
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuuTS_WNw5w
• Stripes
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj6Dfat92u4
• A Few Good Men
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2F4VcBmeo
• Full Metal jacket
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUc62jD-G0o

Thanks to a tweet from GNA, I realized I missed a golden clip:

“Boy, I am two seconds from being on you like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm,” Me as Major Payne. Serious.

— GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) July 12, 2012

I also used the Warfare drums freesound music by jobro http://www.freesound.org/people/jobro/sounds/87136/

And you should know (thanks to a 6th bad ass Major), for some of you I am two seconds from being on you like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm…

Now I wil try and get a little (a tiny bit) serious. I see a lot in our students and open participants, sometimes to take the assignments and Daily Creates way to literal. Like today, draw a tornado. Sure you could take 115 seconds, and make a swirl on a piece of paper, and be done. Fine.

But where is the challenge to yourself in doing that? How is just doing the minimum going to make you more creative? It won’t. It is a jelly doughnut in the foot locker. It is less then #4life.

Here is what I wrote some of my Arizona colleagues when I nagged them on the CyberSalonAZ google group list:

Here’s the scoop -open your minds and do not be trapped in being so literal. Is it really a challenge to yourself to quickly make a swirl on a piece of paper?

Ok, that is the basic requirement. But it shows no imagination. No extending of the creative muscles. It is all too often what we see in students- set the bar for expectations, and they aim right for that.

The whole point of the Daily Create is to extend yourself, not just to do what it says. Frankly, I will yawn if I see a bunch of swirls.

The magic here is how you *interpret* the assignment. It does not have to look like a tornado, but represent it, or what it calls to mind. Maybe it’s the witches legs underneath a house. Maybe its a lonely view out a windshield of a storm chaser. Maybe its a drawing of a shower drain (think how the water goes down). Look up the etymology of the word and go from there. Draw something that represents the places(s) where tornados happen.

A few years ago when the Daily Shoot was active, I spent a week doing the *opposite* of every challenge. THERE ARE NO RULES, why are we so bound by rules? Make something up, and explain it or tease it out in a caption. See what Michael Branson Smith did in his by making a cat tornado in a baseball stadium. That is taking the assignment to a new (and weird) place.

Or there was someone who said yesterday’s assignment (a photo of a cloud that looks like an object) she could not do because it was overcast and rainy. LAME. Make your own clouds in the shower! Draw them on paper! Make shapes out of cotton balls.

No excuses are valid in my book, none.

You do not get to be better at stuff by doing the minimum. That keeps you at the same level.

The world needs more bending of the rules, more making end arounds, more creativity.

If you really want to see someone who gets this, listen to this talk by Helen Keegan:

You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you.

Tomorrow is Day 2. Bring your top game.

He’s the baddest cop on the streets in 1908…

I felt I was overdue to sit down and do a ds106 assignment, one to do some iMovie work as a demo for our current students. I was called back to do Return to the Silent Era (one I added myself) with the hopes that I could push iMovie a bit farther than the last one I did — 2001 a Space Odyssey set back 100 years.

The assignment is:

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.

I was trying to think about what would be interesting to set to silent era- it’s easy to look to science fiction or movies from the future. Too easy. I combed through my video drawer and saw the Dirty Harry disc there, and said hmmm, the opening action sequence that defines Harry’s character, his lunch ruined because of some criminal activity that just lands in front of him, the first of the “Do You Feel Lucky, Punk” lines would be fun. It’s the whole juxtaposition of the same lines played out at the end that defines the criminal mind of Scorpio.

The look of the original film had all the stampings of the 1970 era (filmed in 1971), the big cars, mutton chop sideburns, the semi flattened lighting, the lingering feel of the hippie era– all of this seemed interesting to try and take back to a different era via the silent film treatment. Would Harry be as tough with that big gun back in 1908? Would his isolationist character command the same results?

Go ahead…

I started by finding and downloading the 740p version of the scene

I started by making up my title frame in Photoshop, starting with one I found out there. I wanted to add an icon, so I pulled apart the top figure to leave room to insert a 44 Magnum:

(click for full size)

I added some noise and cracelature filter to make it a little more dirty.

Here is a snapshot of my working area in iMovie (this is iMovie 11, so some of the tools and menu names are different in earlier versions):

(click for full size)

After loading the clip in iMovie, I first dragged the graphic for the title card I made to right in front of the video clip. I use the small on the clip to go to clip effects and added the “romantic” one which made it glow.

For the text I dragged the Center style right onto the frame, and added my text. By highlighting the text, and selecting “Show Fonts” I switched it to “Goudy Old Style”. Later I will show you an easy way to replicate this.

The next steps are going through the clip and making splits on key segments. These include points right after some dialogue that I want to add the title cards, pretty much in this case, all of Harry’s lines. To break up clips, just move the cursor to the point where you want a split, press control to get the contextual menu, and select “Split Clip”. I also split in places where I knew I might want to have different clip speeds.

COpying the title card is a matter of clicking once to select its frame (it lights up yellow) and then command C to copy. Move the cursor just to the right of another split to paste a copy of the card.

Then for the title, click an existing title (the blue bar above), and press the option key and drag it until it drapes over the entire new card (the blue should fill the rane, my screen shot is off a bit). This will make a copy of the text track with all the same settings and make it fit in the same length of time as the card.

You might have to mess with the font size to make things fit.

I did this for all the dialogue. Once I had that in place, it is time to remove the original audio. I selected each clip, and selected Mute Clup from the Clip menu (or just command-Shift-m).

The next steps are to give the video the old style treatment; while there is an aged film effect, I dont like it because it does a sepia tone, and it is too bad you cannot apply more thane one effect (like adding a black and white). I have a trick though!

On the small menu on each clip (looks like a gear) first sslect Video Effect, and set the saturation to 0- this makes it black and white:

I then press the Clip tab for these adjustments. I found that the “Glow” effect worked well to give it a washed out look, your mileage may vary and the vignette or the Romantic work well. For the action sequence I sped up the clips in various amounts to give it that frenetic energy, anywhere from 120% to 400%.

I repeated these steps on every section.

There were a few places I trimmed the clip, and one or two when I needed Harry’s mouth moving, so I would copy and paste a clip of him, reversing it so he would not be an exact duplicate each time.

Once the video was all ready, I went to the Internet archive, and found some ragtime music in the 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings collection called Ragtime Echos (1918) featuring Samuel Siegel on mandolin and Marie Caveny on ukulele.

I downloaded the mp3 version and dragged it onto the iMovie track, making sure it lined up below the tracks (so it is not made into a background for the entire project). Here is another trick, since my audio track is longer (you can drag the right and of the clip to extend it as far as it will go) I click the audio track gear icon, and chose “Audio Adjustments”. I set the fadeout to be manual so ti will fade before it ends abruptly.

Thats pretty much the editing. I had planned to do a longer feature, a middle clip of the Harry/Scorpio confrontation in the football stadium, and the closing chase scene which bookends the original. But alas, you get the idea, and the “Do you feel lucky” scene sites fine with me as a single thing.

I wanted to try the trick Michael Branson Smith does to add more effects to his videos by using the 8mm app on his iPhone but alas, I could not figure out how to upload it so the app would see it. I hope it is not as crazy as just filming it off the screen!

I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, but oh, I stayed up way too late doing this.

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.

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 poster as 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.

For the ds106 assignment One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds

Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies.

I went for my familiar territory, cops from the 1960s-1970s who just don’t fit in. They clash with the bosses and the bad guys. They are heroic badness.

Featured include:

• Al Pacino (Serpico, 1973)
• Steve McQueen (Bullit, 1968)
• Robert Blake (Electra Glide in Blue, 1973)
• Clint Eastwood (Magnum Force, 1973)
• Richard Roundtree (Shaft 1971 the original)

Electra Glide in Blue is the only one I have not seen, and given what I read of its location shot in Arizona, I’m gonna put it on my list.

I downloaded clips for all movies exvept Bullit from YouTube (I have Bulitt ripped for doing another assignment). For all of these I trimmed 5 second sections in MPEG StreamClip, an dimported into iMovie- from there I narrowed each down to a second, which is damned hard to pick.

I went over by one second. What are you gonna do?

Another great assignment in less being harder to do.

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!