When I saw the Opening Credits Redux assignment I thought you could do something really unique with this. This assignment involves taking movie credits and remaking them however you want! I actually did my own little twist on this assignment. I took a tv show that really doesn’t have opening credits and created some for it! I knew what I wanted to do, however I wasn’t sure how I was going to execute it. I decided to look at other student’s works for this assignment. The example I looked at was a remix of the credits for Pulp Fiction. This gave me the idea that it didn’t have to be a movie and I could use still pictures (very helpful when your original idea doesn’t exactly work). I would have liked to look at more examples, however the rest of the links didn’t work anymore.

After pondering about the assignment I came up with an idea and the direction I wanted to take this assignment in. I outlined them in some Pre-Production ideas. I wanted to pay tribute to each of the Planet Earth episodes by taking a clip from each and scrolling through them. However, once I had all of the clips downloads from youtube and cut with MPEG streamclip, my Real Player would not convert them to .wmv clips so I could upload them to Windows Movie Maker. This one little fault caused me to lose about three hours of work. To say the least I was not a happy person. I actually almost gave up on the project. However, being the trooper I am I decided to try and carry it out another way. It took me a few days to go back to the assignment and try and figure out another way to do it, but I came back. I still wanted scenes from the movie, but decided to pay tribute to the producers instead of just the episodes. I think they deserve a little more notice for their work. I then decided to take just still pictures (courtesy of the Pulp Fiction example) from a mixture of the episodes and put them together with the names of the producers. I googled and carefully selected my favorite pictures (gave all of the websites tributes at the end). I put them together in an order I liked using Windows Movie Maker and added the captions to the pictures. But it just wasn’t enough. It looked boring. So I decided to add transitions. I am still trying to figure out Windows Movie maker and feel it doesn’t have a lot of options (or if it does I have no idea where to find them). I chose a fading transition for the captions and a sliding transition for the pictures to move. The next step was music. I actually asked my roommate what she thought would be good music. I showed her the example and she immediately came up with the Circle of Life. It was perfect. So I went to youtube and found the audio and converted it to an mp3. I then imported it into the movie and had it fade at the end.

Overall I think the story here is more of how I overcame my frustrations and actually completed the assignment instead of just leaving it be. This project took about 3 days of thinking and getting materials together. It was definitely the longest time I have spent on an assignment for this class. I like the way it turned out, however I do feel I was a bit constrained by Windows Movie Maker. I am slowly coming to realize that I really am not a big fan of this application. I see other videos done with iMovie and wish I could add more effects in. I’m not sure if I just haven’t explored WMM enough or if it really does not offer these options (like moving text). However, I will work with what I have to the best of my ability.