My first real attempt at video editing was with the “Return to the Silent Era” (?????) assignment.

I chose to begin by finding a good trailer on YouTube that I could manipulate with iMovie and make into something that resembled a Silent Era film. I settled on the trailer for Black Swan (2010).

To begin with I used PwnYouTube to download the content of the trailer and then I opened it in MPEGStreamclip, and then saved it and opened it in iMovie. iMovie is really a great tool to do video editing in. Editing film can be incredibly discouraging and difficult, but iMovie is very well designed and simple to use even if you barely have a clue what you’re doing.

If you’ve seen that movie, you know that parts of it are pretty graphic, and as someone who is really squeamish, I had to cut a couple of seconds out of my created trailer. Specifically the moment where Natalie Portman is shown pulling the pointy end of a feather out of her own skin…(gag). I left the rest of it pretty much as is, except for shortening some clips with a lot of dialogue, because silent films don’t feature lots of people talking to each other.

I made the necessary cuts to my creation, and then I went in and changed the whole thing to black and white using the Inspector tool under the Video Settings. If you highlight what you are changing, in this case that was everything, you can change the saturation, exposure, and contrast to make it look more like a black and white silent film.

After that, I muted the regular volume of the entire thing and started deciding what music I wanted to play over the whole thing. I settled on some kind of eerie piano music, since that kind of made me think of music boxes and ballerinas. I used FreeSound to gather up a couple of different clips of piano music. I then used the sound and audio effects tab in iMovie to add the right clip of music to the right clip of video. It took me a little while to figure out that you have to drag the clips from the Event section to the Project section, and you have to be careful when you are adding the sound effects that you add them in a way that the sound you choose isn’t playing throughout the entire Project.

So I finished the whole thing and iMovie has a very cool feature where you can just upload your Project straight to YouTube without having to mess with a bunch of other stuff.

It really was not hard to do, it just took me a little while because I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I wanted the sounds to match up perfectly and to make sense with the video content. I’m not sure I did exactly what I was planning to, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out.