To dive deeper into my character, I decided to do the 3 video assignments this week. This first one I’m going to post about is the assignment Character Description. The main focus was to make a video describing your character. I decided to role play a bit and do the video as Kevin (yeah, it’s my voice but I played up the internet bro slang a bit) doing an intro to his new blog. I hope it came out ok. I used Microsoft Clipchamp and after messing around in it FOREVER last week, I think I ironed out the kinks.
Category Archives: video assignments
Video Essay Oh No…
I had a rough time with this. I have found out that I am not very good with video editing software. First, I tried to use Microsoft Clipchamp and I was getting the hang of it, but I could just not seem to figure out how to get things the way I like or the way I envisioned them. I was working on this all week, and I could not seem to figure it out, so I decided to use a different program to talk over myself watching the scene and pausing at key moments to discuss. I managed to use Loom to get that to work but I could not get the video volume to come through while I was recording. Good thing I was only discussing lighting… So, I was still unable to get audio of the scene, but my voice and thoughts carried through fine so now that I’m down to the wire I just decided to try and embed the file in this post. Now that I am trying, I can’t from loom for some reason… If I do the link copy route, it doesn’t actually put the video on my post. If I go the embed code route, it still won’t. So, I decided to download the video from loom. It is an MP4 and will not embed as a video in this post for some reason. Says it is an unsupported file type. So, I am having a hell of a time trying to get this to work. what I am going to do next week is get on my wife’s Mac and use I movie for whatever I need. this stuff as just not working for me this week and I am really disappointed that I could not get my point across the way I wanted. I have found my media weakness and that is video editing. Below is the video i am trying to embed, I hope it works. If it doesn’t here is the link to the page.
Video Essay – Stealth
The main assignment this week was to learn about film making by watching and reading some information. I Highly recommend the You Tube series “Every Frame a Painting”. I learned a lot and enjoyed them very much. After we did our learning, we had to take a clip of the movie and do a voice over of our critique of the scene.
I was looking at the list of movies on Wikipedia, we were supplied, and I realized I have seen almost all of them. I learned I do watch a lot of sci-fi. The movies easy to find I have seen. I couldn’t remember the exact ending of the movie Stealth or if I had seen it on video or in theaters. It was easy to find so I went with that one. I was not even halfway through when I realized why I didn’t remember the movie. I found it very boring. I tried applying everything I learned from watching the movie making videos. I was watching for camera angles, lighting, how the scene was cut etc. Still boring. I found a few decent scenes that I jotted the time stamp down for that could be more fun or interesting to talk about.
Now came time for the downloading of a scene. I quickly realized on Thursday that it would be easiest just to find a high-resolution scene already on the internet to work with. I didn’t find any of the ones that I thought would be fun to work with. I did find one that wasn’t all action with the CGI planes.
I couldn’t just download it. I signed up to try You Tube premium free for 30 days. Turns out you can only view it in YouTube. Alright time to research and find a way.
I found this video
So, then I learned there was no way to download the video. It is Friday at noon, and I have a mild fever and caught a cold. (at least it better not turn out to be the flu) There is no going to campus today to get help. (in case you don’t remember I own a house, have kids etc.) I do own a video camera of decent quality or there is my smart phone. Let’s be pirates! I downloaded a program with dubious origins and hoped for the best. (please don’t let it be virus ridden) I then paid for the programs. I already had Adobe Premier Rush, so I was golden.
I made the voice over and it isn’t even 2 pm yet. New problem, You Tube doesn’t like the movie clip, copy right infringement. Now to use a new platform for uploading. Vimeo for the win.
I am glad I got this done before I lost my voice. My throat hurts and I am coming down with something. This take will have to do. I spent the most time trying to get a clip to do the voice over on. Once I got the clip it was easy to do a voice over on it.
A few scenes I liked better are a meeting held on the ship over a game of scrabble that takes place about 30 minutes into the movie. Has a lot of foreshadowing happening. The camera angles and placement of characters is one of the best in the whole movie. The grounding of EDI at minute 46 is also interesting. At hour 1:16 you have what I call the blame game scene. it has the “bad guys” in shadow speaking over the phone blaming each other for what went wrong. It cuts back and forth to the two men on the phone in darkness trying to one up each other. I felt it made good use of editing during the argument of who can better take down whom.
While I found the movie to be predictable and slow my husband enjoyed the movie very much. The movie had a want to be Top Gun vibe and spent a lot of money on the CGI of the state-of-the-art planes (that are not real) I noticed the font used in the credits was the same used in the Spider-man movies starring Toby McGuire. I wanted to put all this into a recording but no voice. Now that I have found the programs to use doing it again wouldn’t be too difficult.
Breaking News!
For my second assignment of choice, I decided to do Breaking News! The objective was to create a fake news story by using an AI text to speech software. I used the site that was recommended, Colossyan and some free sound from Freesound to create my audio video news story. I also used the 123RF image generator to get some hilarious pictures for the backgrounds. Below is the result of my strange brain and having free access to these tools.
The AI mispronounced a few words but that’s ok, I think you get the gist. I really liked this assignment because I got to make up an insane news story and use a few more neat tools. I will definitely b using them again on future assignments.
10 Tips On What Not To Do
I decided to give you 10 tips on how not to administer a Turing test. A Turing test is a series of questions that are given to a computer to evaluate its intelligence. It was developed by Alan Turing in the 1950’s. I don’t know what the questions are and have no experience with the test or the questions. It was a lot of fun thinking of what wouldn’t work for such a test. I enlisted my children as actors. Enjoy the chaos.
When I went to upload my video on Friday the 26th I found it was too big to be supported on my blog. I had a midnight deadline and could not figure out what to do. I was so disappointed. I spent hours on this video this week learning how to use the software and editing the clips together. While I know it isn’t perfect, I am proud of the work I did and the skills I am learning.
I emailed my professor and asked how to get my video on my blog. Answer upload to You Tube. I now have a You Tube channel. It will now be part of my blog and my adventures in DS106.
I am happy to present my 1st YouTube video. I hope you enjoyed it.