Category Archives: VideoAssignments

Attack of the Robotic Bees – Black Mirror Video Essay

I love video essays, especially for movies and tv shows. I watch them in my free time a lot and I really enjoyed watching the Tony Zhou videos. When I was making my video essay, I was trying to emulate what I had seen in the videos before. In this video, I talk about the world building in this episode as well as the movement composure and the audio in this scene. I also tried my best to incorporate that “Therefore & But” method in this video although it was a bit of a struggle. I really wanted to talk about those three things, but I had trouble figuring where the “Therefore” and the “But” went and I had issues trying not so say “and then.” When I was making the video, I recorded my script and added it plus the scene into Adobe Premiere Pro. From there, I tried to cut up the scene so that what I was talking about matched what was being shown.

Help Wanted!

The biggest challenge of this assignment was finding a scene I could use in my video. Normally, if I want to use a video from YouTube I screen record the video. However there were essentially no full scenes on YouTube, even this one wasn’t the full scene and it was blurry. I tried to google how to do it, but most answers were talking about using pirating websites. I liked this assignment and I wouldn’t mind doing it again in the future for another class or for a final project, so if anyone has any tips on how to download high quality scenes in full please leave a comment. I need help!

Cavi Gone Wild

As an introduction, my dog’s name is Cavi and she is a 6 year old golden doodle with lots of energy. She gets super excited about lots of things, especially going for car rides and seeing new people. I wanted to do this assignment because I wanted to share my dog and I’d actually never made a Tiktok before this assignment. I found a video of my dog and browsed for the perfect sound. I found a sound called the “Jackass theme” which I thought was the best option after hearing it along with the video. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself!

The sound of the story

This assignment is called Pictures are Larger than Words. I had a tough time at the start for many reasons. I had forgotten how to screen record first and foremost but I also had no idea what scene I was looking to do. I knew I wanted to do something in Tech Noir so I looked to the TechNoir/Cyberpunk Films/TV list given at the start of the class and browsed through to see if anything caught my eye as interesting. I thought about doing another Black Mirror episode but the scenes I were thinking of were already without dialogue and were just with sound to tell the story along with the visual aide. So instead I went with Tron: Legacy.

At first, because I had chosen an action scene I thought I wanted to add some action music to the background but the film already had a killer soundtrack and I dont think that I could do better or tell a good story with something different but in the same genre of music. So I went with a eerie background noise and let the scene tell itself. Using a mix of a low rumble and a sci-fi machine noise I was able to create a background noise that is not close to the noise already used AND could even tell a different story depending on how the video and/or the sound makes the audience feel. With the more eerie approach I think that the kind of suspense that the scene gives you is now different than the suspense it used to be.

Click on the image for the video

I used iMovie for Apple to create this video and uploaded it (unlisted) on my personal youtube. I first searched for a scene from Tron: Legacy on Youtube and found one that caught my eye. I watched the video with sound and started to think about the type of music or background I wanted to use to replace the audio in the video. In iMovie I used the free audio they had available and I used the sound files “Drone Dark Suspense 02” and “Strange Machine 02”. These two files mixed together give me the type of eerie vibe I was going for. I didnt want static noise so I have the “Strange Machine” to give some sort of variation in the background noise and then “Drone Dark Suspense” was used to get a low humming noise that is used in a lot of horror movies to give a suspenseful feel.

What do you think the story is saying now?

Love is Embarrassing – Compilation Video

*****Spoiler alerts for The Good Place!*****

Edits are very popular these days, and I LOVE a good edit. I have seen some really amazing ones for Barbie, WandaVision, and Community. I really wanted to take a crack at it, since I’ve had some experience using Adobe Premiere Pro, which meant I wouldn’t be starting from square one. For this edit, I took one of my favorite shows The Good Place and put it with one of my favorite songs “Love is Embarrasing” by Olivia Rodrigo.

Eleanor Shellstrop has a significant arc over the course of The Good Place’s run. She starts as this loner who is very selfish, self asorbed character and ends the show surrounded by her chosen family whom she loves and would do anything for. These characteristics have been inside Eleanor all along but the people who were around her put down those traits, so she has to learn how to be okay with taking care of others and being a good person. This especially comes through when she stars to catch feelings for Chidi. At first Eleanor thinks he’s a nerd and doesn’t want anything to do with him. Eventually, however, she realizes she has feelings for Chidi even though she doesn’t want to. This song is the perfect choice to capture how Eleanor feels about Chidi because she is almost repulsed by how she feels towards Chidi, given that she has never felt like that towards a person before. She finds love to be embarrasing.

This video was relatively easy to make. First, I looked for and downloaded an Eleanor and Chidi scene pack which compiles clips of the two. Then I added the scenes into Adobe Premiere Pro and sorted through which clips I wanted to use. Once I had my clips picked out, I added Olivia Rodrigo’s Love is Embarrassing. After that I rearranged the clips, trimmed them to keep each clip short. I also tried to sync the clip transitions to the beat of the song. I feel like this makes edits more satisfying to watch. Finally, the last thing I did was export the video and uploaded it to YouTube.

Here is the final project!

Differing AI Views – Video Project

This week, I interviewed my family and friends about their views on AI to get a sense of the differing views of this new future that’s upon us.

It was really interesting hearing these different views. It was also really hard to hold back my own thoughts, but I did, because I wanted this to be unbiased and not about me.

I put my plans in this post last week, and I wish people would comment on my posts more and tell me if I’m being overambitious, because I think I could’ve saved myself a lot of stress if someone just said, “hey, relax . . . you don’t have to do so much.” I used to get a lot of comments! I guess now I’m just sad that I only get around one or two a week.

Okay, no more negativity. I split my interviews up throughout the week due to time. I interviewed my brother, Bryce, on Saturday, my dad, Brian, on Sunday, my friend, Lorelei, on Tuesday, and my sister, BayLee, on Thursday. I had different people intended to interview, but had to drop them due to complications of their own time. It originally was not going to be mostly my family, but I had to work with what I had.

Interesting thing, my brother, Bryce, is getting married today! So that’s in my later plans for the day!

After recording, I ended up putting everything together Thursday night and Friday morning. I planned to edit this together on my computer, but then I couldn’t send the recordings from my phone to my computer, and it took literally 4 hours to send 3 of the videos to my Google Drive, and I just gave up and thought it’d be better to do it on my phone through iMovie. So I did.

Editing was fun! I have fun cropping out all the “ums,” and it was so nice watching the minutes go from like 36 minutes to 20. If I had to upload a 36 minute video, I really think I would explode into a million pieces. Editing was actually also easy. It’s not like I usually do this, or have experience with it, but I understood it. iMovie was relatively easy. Until it wasn’t.

Exporting. Never again. Never. First it said export failed, then it said I had no storage, and then . . . I deleted all of my storage AND IT WORKED!! I EXPORTED IT!! I have never been happier, oh my god this was a mess.

Overall . . . this was fun! And stressful! But, I’m just happy to have it done.

Watching Movies With the Stereo On

This was the first of three video assignments I did this week and the only one not incorporating my character. I have watched many movies and tv shows with music on in the background so this felt right up my alley. I used the alien taking the asteroid scene from Asteroid City and Vertigo by Khalid in the background. Let me know what you think!

Bumi Being Silly

Upon looking through the Assignment Bank, I just knew I had to do the TikTok of your pet. I have endless pictures and videos of bumi on my phone. Bumi is a very mysterious and calm cat. Him being silly consists of eating the food I’m preparing, looking out windows and wagging his tail, sitting on my laptop as I sit down to do my assignments, and so much more.

I used TikTok to make this and add a sound to my video. I hope you guys enjoy this little clip of him licking the faucet and getting seen!

Now a fact that I have not shared yet about my character is that Chuckles is cat man, he’s got 13 domestic short-haired cats, whereas I have just one! He’s even done a comedy show talking about each cat each night. Those who attended Chuckles’s shows don’t know they were all about his cats though..