And considering I haven’t made many videos…well, I don’t have a lot to go on. Still, this project was AMAZINGLY fun and really not too difficult!

So I took this trailer for the movie The Bourne Identity and attempted to make it look like it was a silent film – see project details here.

Using iMovie, I detached then deleted the audio. Then I deleted the scenes that didn’t fit in with a silent film,  like the snazzy text slides that said “danger is Bourne” and the title scene. Then I used the Aged Film filter for everything – that’s such a useful tool!!

I made a template for my text slides by using PowerPoint; I haven’t figured out how/if GIMP will allow me to draw straight lines; I knew PowerPoint would, so I just made the template there. It was simply a black background, with a white border, and I made a little target lens design for the top, since that’s kind of the icon of the movie. I watched through the trailer a couple of times trying to figure out key scenes and key dialogue that absolutely had to be included; I narrowed it down to 10 or 11 text slides. After that, it was easy enough to go back through the trailer in iMovie and split the clip wherever I wanted to insert the text slide.

The hardest part by far – and I knew it would be – was choosing the music. I don’t know much about classical music; I could hear in my head the kind of music I wanted it to be, but I had absolutely no clue how to find it. Using the links page Professor Levine kindly made for us, I searched through the 78 RPM and Cylinder Recordings archive.

The music I ended up using was Samuel Barber: Symphony No. 1, Op. 9, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Bruno Walter. If you would like to hear the original piece, go here. I edited the track quite a bit in Audacity to make sure that I had appropriate sounds at appropriate times, so it isn’t exactly the same.

Then I stuck it all together and came up with this. I’m actually really excited by it!

The drumbeats are definitely a second or two off at the beginning, but everything else fit so perfectly that I let it slide, because I wasn’t sure how to edit that part without destroying how the rest of the music was in sync.