For my video essay, I choose to use the new Coen Brothers movie, “True Grit.” I was originally planning to do “No Country For Old Men,” but my first rip didn’t work and I immediately gave up on it. Luckily, I had True Grit on my computer so I decided to save myself some time and energy and use that.

Clipping the video in Mpegstreamclip was simple, but at the end of the day I had over 25 minutes of video to deal with. I loaded this all into iMovie to start work on.

(RANT: Over Christmas break I upgraded my OSX to Tigerlilly or Snowflake or whatever is the newest. And you know what Apple did to me, a humble and dedicated customer since 1988? They decided to reclaim my GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto and iDvd. I could now buy them for 15 or so bucks in the App Store. That is highway robbery. I’m currently drafting a letter to Steve Jobs letting him know that while I will continue to buy Apple products, I will be upset for some time to come.)

I paired my 25 videos down to about 10 and started in on my audio narration. I had to use audacity to record and edit, which wasn’t that bad, thanks to our audio portion of ds106. It was difficult to make sure the audio was lined up with the video, especially because I kept clipping sections and adding sections. Also, I believe all the action this footage got (downloading, mpegstreamclip, vlc, imovie, youtube), the quality seems to have suffered.

I uploaded it to Youtube and Vimeo. Youtube won’t let me imbed the video because of copyright issues or claims or something? If I get in trouble for this, I will be forwarding any paperwork directly to Jim Groom.

True Grit Video Essay from David Gallagher on Vimeo.