Category Archives: VideoAssignments439

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!

2001: A Space Odyssey Video Essay

Today I watched the good classic 2001: A Space Odyssey to study Stanley Kubrick’s directing and cinematography. It was a long movie, and I had to separate it into two different watchings because I had to go to work in the middle of it.

This movie . . . wow, it was onto something. I really enjoyed it!! I also think it’s so interesting to see how this was one of the first AI characters in media, and I really thought about how AI has changed so much in film. It also had the trope that AI learns too much and becomes evil, so that was interesting how that idea was present even in the 60s.

For the Assignment, I did a video essay on one of the scenes in which HAL-9000, the AI in the film, was observing and listening (or reading) the two humans, Dave and Frank, discuss that maybe HAL was malfunctioning. It’s the turning point, and it’s a tense scene that has barely any movement.

Some notes about my video essay: I used OBS to record the movie and Microsoft Clipchamp to film the audio voiceover and edit. And it was hell. I couldn’t zoom in on the audio and I felt very far away and with limited control. At one point, I tried to drag the audio, and it completely disappeared . . . and I couldn’t get it back despite still hearing it . . . so please ignore the little error where my voice repeats itself! I literally could not see the audio.

Overall thoughts were, the movie was great, the filming and storytelling through tiny tiny things was so powerful. The voiceover was also like fighting a war, I filmed 3 different takes before deciding I just needed to make a script and hope for the best. Editing made me want to slam my head into a wall (also I tried OpenShot first, and couldn’t import my video at all so I gave up), despite having a little experience in editing. I definitely, definitely need more practice.

Ex Machina Shines in the Sun🌴:

by Greta Hammen

I chose a scene from the movie Ex Machina to analyze. I downloaded it from YouTube, by upgrading to premium temporarily. It took me a great deal of time to get it into Premiere Pro. The tutorials on the assignment bank page have expired, but once it became apparent to me that I needed to convert the download that was stored in my account on YouTube (and not in the downloads in my computer), then I converted it to a mp4 and downloaded it. In Premiere Pro, I imported the file and lowered the audio gain to -10. Then on a separate layer, I did my voice over narration. I really focused on the cinematography and lighting. If I do another one, I will discuss more of what is happening in the story and between the characters. After the first recording of my voice, I noticed that my comments were not in sync with the action in the shots. I did some cutting to see if I could get a smooth track, but I ended up re-recording my voice over and that was the better option.

Ava had different plans for her life.