So far I’ve completed 7 stars of Video Assignments. My next assignment is a BIG one, with 5 stars. I was a little nervous taking on a 5 star assignment, and while it was time consuming it wasn’t to terribly challenging.

My 5 star assignment was a “Return to the Silent Era“. For this assignment, you take a modern day movie trailer and turn it into black and white, remove the audio and replace it with a new sound track.

I chose The Hunger Games movie trailer for this assignment. It is a fairly new movie and I thought it would be a fun movie to recreate as a silent film. So, first I used KeepVid to download it as an MP4 to my computer. KeepVid is my go to for Youtube downloads, I find it the easiest and fastest program to use. From there I uploaded it into iMovie I cropped out parts that were not actual film (ie: release date info, etc).

When I decided to do this project, I looked at examples (which I usually do before fully committing) and the first example took me to Kelsie’s blog and her assignment was AMAZING! That girl is talented! But I read that she got her cue cards from google, so I headed over there myself and found a great choice for my video.

I plugged those into iMovie and added my script. I then went into each clip and transformed it into Black and White and cut the sound. All I had to do was put into the music. I went over to Freesound.org and just typed in Silent movie music. I chose this sound for the majority of the trailer. Then I typed in dramatic sounds and chose this sound because I felt it was perfect for two different parts of the trailer. After those downloaded, it was just a matter of putting them into iMovie and getting the sounds to match up with one another. There are two spots that do not have music, maybe for a couple of seconds. This wasn’t intentional at first, one sound ends and the second is very quiet in the beginning so there is just no sound.

Here is a screen shot of my work in iMovie. I couldn’t get the screen shot in one pictures so sorry for it being split up.

Once I had everything how I wanted it, I just uploaded it to Youtube and you can watch it below. I think it turned out really well and the music fit perfectly! Hope you enjoy.

Do you think you could watch a silent movie? I’m not sure I could, I like to hear the dialogue between characters.

12/16 stars