The first video assignment I decided to complete this week (and outlined last week) was called Play by Play. This was one of the first video assignments that caught my eye last week in the list that gave us examples of assignments we could outline. I really liked the idea of this one because you could take a video of ANYTHING and put your own personal commentary on there. There was an example of this assignment already done and I thought it was very clever of this person to do a commentary of himself playing a video game.

So my immediate thoughts were to take a video from America’s Funniest Home Video and create commentary on that. I thought this would be a funny take on the assignment and I could choose from any kind of home videos played on this television show. However, I ended up deciding not to do this and use a sports video instead… Typical because I’m an athlete. Also, I used soccer.. Can’t get enough of it!

I remember a few years ago there was a huge controversy over this one female soccer player from New Mexico who played an extremely aggressive game. The most dramatic part of the video was her yanking on her opponent’s hair so hard that she fell to the ground. You can find the original video here.

The first thing I did was to convert this YouTube video into mp4 format like I did last week with the Any Given Sunday video when I was combining two clips. Once the video I wanted was opened, I clicked on the Pwn YouTube link and the yellow letters popped up and I clicked on the mp4. I saved it as simply Elizabeth Lambert onto a file called Play by Play in my Video Assignments folder so that it would be easy for me to find.

Next, I opened this file onto MPEG StreamClip so that I could trim the part of the video that I wanted and get rid of the access video. I cut out all of the video after the 43:46 part because I only needed the portion of the video that showed the clips of her overly aggressive play.

I then saved this onto my Play by Play file and opened it onto Windows Movie Maker as a new project. Next, I needed to create my commentary using Audacity. Before I did this, I made sure to mute the original ESPN commentary on the video so that only my commentary would be heard. I did this on Movie Maker by going to the Edit tab, Video Volume, and muting it. I wanted to make sure to overlap my commentary with the video and also had to make sure that the commentary was in sync with where I wanted to say things during the video. So I opened Audacity, clicked the red Record button, then switched back to the video and played the video while I spoke.

I noticed that when I overlapped the video with the commentary, it was kind of stale and boring. So, to make it more interesting, I wanted to add some music to it. I google’d “Common Warm Up Songs” and a great site came up giving me 100 options. I decided to use Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off My Shoulder” because I really liked the beat of the song and thought it would work well for this assignment. I also decided to use an instrumental version of the song so as to keep the viewer/listener focused on my words and not those of Jay-Z. To convert this video to mp3, I used Video2mp3 and saved it as a file in my Play by Play folder.

I decided to overlap my commentary and this song in Audacity so that when I added it to Movie Maker it would just an easier transition and easier to move around wherever I wanted it to go. So I did this and fiddled with the sound a little bit there to make my commentary louder and the music softer so my words would still be the primary focus. Next, I added this to the video and made sure my words were in time with the clips and they were!

Finally, I added a Title Slide with a Spin In effect. This gave it a “newspaper-y” feel to it and I think that helped to add to the storytelling part of this! I also added a Credits Slide so as to sum everything up and also give credit to the music I used. For this slide, I used a Spin Out effect to represent an ending to the video. Overall, this wasn’t too hard to figure out just took a long time!

2 STARS

TOTAL STARS: 2/16

And here’s the final product!!!