To me, Return to the Silent Era seemed like such a unique project. It involves taking a modern movie and transforming it into a time piece. To give it an old timey feel, it was suggested to change it to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, take away the sound, add music, and maybe some title cards too. I got some really good ideas from examples. However, most were done with iMovie and it took me some time to figure out how to do it with Windows Movie Maker. My favorite example was one done with Mean Girls. It is actually one of my friend’s projects. She did a really good job in speeding up the movie. It was the first example I looked at so I got a feel for the “antiquity” part of the assignment. I also think the movie was a really good choice because the idea of it is very far from the older Silent Movies. The next example I looked at was Martha’s on Teen Wolf. I loved how she changed the wording to words they might have used in older times. It gave a really unique feel to the video. She also used unique cue cards. Using these two examples I put my own twist on Finding Neemo.

I chose this assignment because it is extremely unique. Silent Movies are rarely seen anymore. In fact, more effects are being added to a movie every day. I believe that silent movies really capture the actual story without extra things being added. Don’t get me wrong, special effects can add so much to a movie but I think occasionally it’s nice to just watch a good story. So the real reason I chose Finding Neemo is because it truly is my favorite movie. I think the animation in it is awesome. It’s very realistic to actual fish movement (having taking Bio of Fish and spent a summer working in an aquarium I would know). The story is also very inspiring. It’s about a fish who comes out of his shell to save his son and the adventure of a son getting into a bit of trouble. In the end, everything is happy. The two are reunited and life is wonderful. So of course, this was the story I was going to put the characters in silence. I really want the story to stand out and taking away vocals really makes that happen.

I started with Pre-Production first. I got all of my materials together including: Finding Neemo Trailer, tools I needed to use, an idea of what effects to use, and a sample of my music. I have never really used Windows Movie Maker before so it was a bit of an on-going tough process. I first had problems uploading my video to it. Apparently WMM doesn’t work well with mp4. So I downloaded real player to convert it to a .wmv file. It worked like a charm. I then uploaded my video to WMM and sat and stared for about 15 minutes. I had no idea what to do. So, I went for the basics. I found the effects bar and dragged the “black and white” effects to my movie. I didn’t like it, so I deleted that effects. I then added the sepia effects and that was better. The black and white was too harsh for me. It was then I found the “film age, old” effects. And it was perfect. Slowly this film was starting to look  like a silent movie. But, there was one problem: the sounds. I had no idea how to delete the vocals on the movie. I started playing around with volume and random buttons. I finally googled it and found a simple explanation: Clip tab, audio, mute. So simple! It still wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to add in some sort of titles. I didn’t like the look of adding the titles and separating the clip. With WMM you could only change the back ground color (Martha’s were much cooler) so I added the titles on the clip. I actually really liked how the captions turned out. I played around with the font until I came across one that had a “flow” to it. I first had them in black, but they didn’t stand out enough. And since it was supposed to be colorless I changed it to white and it turned out perfectly! I thought everything was too slow so I then sped up the movie. There were already a few frantic clips so I didn’t speed it up too much (FYI a hint, speed up the movie before adding in clips). The next step was the music. I searched youtube for a ragtime piano music. I looked through a lot of them and didn’t like them. Some had vocals, some were too slow, some just didn’t sound right. The music I chose was actually on the first page I had just skipped over it because it was too slow. I decided to play with it. I loaded it into audacity and sped it up a bit. I also changed the tempo some too. I thought it sounded OK, so I added it to the film. The music is actually my favorite part! I think it goes along perfectly with the beat of the characters in the movie!

The credits were the last piece. I wanted to give credit where credit was due (mainly me, but added in Disney and Pixar too). I also felt since it was originally a trailer it left the audience hanging. That wasn’t the silent movie way so I added in what happens in the end on the credits too. There are many things I could have added (old fashion words, cool title slides) but I felt the way I put everything together had the effect I was shooting for. I didn’t want to change the story around, just make it old fashioned. I really like how the whole thing came together in the end.

I tried to get some feedback on this project, but was wildly unsuccessful. I showed my mom when I went home to vote and she said it was “cute” and “good work”. Not much enthusiasm there… And then there was my roommate who really liked it but laughed at the amount of time and how frustrated I got with it. She sort of went through the process with me and had to listen to the tangents I went on about how WMM wouldn’t work. However, the best feedback is how proud I am of the video (I know, cheesy right?)

So I think the overall story is how I worked through my problems and created this piece. It was my first time working with WMM and other tools and had to figure out a few quirks to get going. This is just a start of my video work and there is more to come. I’m sure I will have more difficulties and frustrations to come with those projects however, now I have an idea of how to work through them (mainly Google).