Category Archives: videoessay

video essay: passengers

For our video essay, I chose to watch Passengers, specifically the turning point in the movie when the big plot’s secret point is revealed.

I love telling the world about my unreasonable opinions so I was very excited to start this project. Though unfortunately for you all, I toned down my nonsense a little to cut down the video time.

My process for this video was pretty simple and shockingly wasn’t too stressful since I had video editing experience before this. The only part that added extra stress was adding a recap to the video. It was only a minute long but took a little bit longer because of the cuts I wanted to be synched to the audio.

I first searched for footage on YouTube since I couldn’t rip it from a DVD. I used the 4K Video Downloader that was recommended we use. I then wrote my script while rewatching the scene so that I wouldn’t have a harder time synching it later. In the theme of AI, I decided to use a text-to-speech reader from last week TTSMaker for two reasons. I was a little ill this week and unlike humans, software delivers the same lines the same way every time. I then found some nice background music on Freesound so that the video wasn’t stagnant in the pauses. After all those steps it was pretty easy to just import them all into iMovie and edit for a bit until the I got final product you see now.

I enjoyed making this video essay a lot and I would definitely do it again. I didn’t realize how much I like critiquing media that I find interesting. And I felt a lot better about doing it after doing the reading from this week. I might have spent a little too much time on the videos because I love film analysis or really just any type of analysis. Hopefully, next week isn’t a trainwreck but I guess we’ll see.

The videos and sound I used are here: PASSENGERS – Official Trailer (HD), Passengers (2016) – Did You Wake Me Up? Scene (5/10) | Movieclips, and Passengers: Did You Wake Me Up? (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt Scene).

The Art of Filmaking: A Scene from Avengers: Infinity War

This week’s major assignment was to choose a moment from a movie that included AI and then use voice-over narration to discuss it. We were instructed to concentrate on the filmmaking technique rather than the acting or plot during the voice-over narration. Even though Professor Bond says it could be simpler to examine a movie you don’t particularly enjoy, I decided to base my video essay on a scene from Avengers: Infinity War, which is one of my all-time favorite films. The particular scene I choose was when Thanos attacks Vision, an AI superhero, to take the mind stone out of Vision’s head.  I chose this scene because it had a lot going on in a short amount of time, including excellent editing, special effects, and visual composition. View my video essay above!

Stepford Wives Scene Analysis

I decided to go with the 1975 Stepford Wives film for this assignment because I think that the intersection of fears of gender roles and AI creates an interesting discussion. Dr. Oblivion was especially helpful with this research and pointed out ideas I hadn’t thought of, like how women may fear being seen or used as a tool in the same way that we would use AI as a tool. I used Clipchamp as that it the editing software that comes with my computer and it is what I am most familiar with. The editing process wasn’t bad at all. I think the most time consuming part of this assignment was picking out the right scene and writing down notes for analysis. I wanted to pick a scene that was fairly easy to analyze with simple elements such as sound design and color contrasting, and I think this scene fits the bill. I had done a film analysis for another class in the past, but I think this was even more difficult because you had to pay more attention and pick apart such a small clip. Overall I enjoyed this assignment!

ai106 – raptnrent.me 2024-02-12 17:30:55

I hadn’t done a video analysis in a while, so I thought I should give it a try. I wanted something AI-related to work with. My first thought was Blade Runner, since I had a copy from the library, but that’s probably been done to the point where I couldn’t add anything. Ghost in the Shell was another possibility, since I watched it recently for the first time. That would have the added benefit of looking at how cinematic technique works in animation. But then I thought of the old TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which occasionally dealt with nascent AI systems in development. I went to see what clips were available on Youtube, and found Agent Ellison Plays Chess With John Henry, which seemed like it would do.

I watched the clip through a few times, noting things I thought significant. I wrote out what I wanted to say and recorded it in Audacity, and then went back through the recording to clean up some pauses and breathing noises.

The Zhou videos I reference are Joel & Ethan Coen – Shot | Reverse Shot and The Silence of the Lambs – Who Wins the Scene?.

I grabbed the clip from Youtube and brought it and an MP3 of my voice-over into iMovie. The voice-over was longer than the clip, and what I had to say didn’t line up with the video properly, so I had some decisions to make. I split the VO track (Ctrl-B) and moved parts to the appropriate spots. I also dropped the volume on the clip when I was talking. I used the freeze-frame function at one point to get the video and VO aligned, and copied some clips of video and placed them to go with the VO. Then I decided to run the whole clip a second time after my track ended, so a viewer could see what I was talking about in proper context. I added some titles as well, then used File->Share to convert it to an MP4 that I could upload to Youtube.

I took my VO script and the transcript of the video from Youtube and put them together in a text document. I cleaned up the capitalization and punctuation in the Youtube transcript, since it was auto-generated. When I uploaded my iMovie output to Youtube, I added my text file for the subtitles. When I watched the video the next day, the punctuation and capitalization were missing so I realized that I forgot to click the Publish button after I put in the text, leaving it with auto-generated captions. So I went back into Youtube and fixed it. Not the first time that’s happened. Youtube gave the video a copyright warning, but didn’t block it.

I think the essay works okay. The things I don’t like come from issues in the source material, namely the low definition and the shaky camera. And the sound of my voice. But what can you do? It was worthwhile though to take a close, analytical look at the scene and think about what it was showing and how. It gives me a better appreciation for the show, and for film-making in general.

Real Steel!!!

One of the assignments that we needed to do this week was to create a video essay of a scene from an movie related to the field of Artificial Intelligence and talk about the scene itself, almost like a mini film review and instead of doing the whole movie, we had just to pick one scene and talk about that scene. I decided to do a scene from the movie Real Steel in which the main character, played by Hugh Jackman, is walking outside of his motel room and starts walking down a dimmly-lit alleyway and then the scene cuts to him and his robot boxer outside, during the day on the lawn of the motel. I chose this scene because one of the videos that we needed to watch this week talked about how movies use cuts in their scenes to bring more emphasis to the scenes. In this case, the cut at the end of the beginning of the scene where it cuts to them being the lawn shows that a little time has gone by and that the characters were beginning the climax of the scene which was the actual training. It was important to note that from the Tony Zhou video, he stated that film makers use cuts to try and show that the scene is beginning to get to the climax of the scene. This is shown perfectly in this scene because when they cut to the training montage, that is the climax of the scene and that shows that the characters are getting ready to act out the main point of the scene. I have created a full vide essay on this scene and you can find it at the following link.