This assignment took forever! The second video assignment I decided to do was Return to the Silent Era. This seemed like a really cool assignment because you had to take a trailer from a modern movie and make it antiquated and make it silent era-y.

So at first I wasn’t sure what movie exactly I wanted to do, but I know I wanted to do a movie that I knew pretty well and could work easily with to summarize the movie in the trailer. I watched a couple of the examples that had been done recently by students and really liked my friend Brittany’s silent trailer version of Finding Nemo. I really liked how she had the captions over the scenes of the trailer. I also saw examples that had separated the video clip with a slide with text. I liked putting words onto the actual video so I decided to go with that style for my assignment.

I decided on using a trailer for She’s the Man, with Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. So to start, I went to YouTube, found the trailer I wanted to use, and used Pwn YouTube to download it as a .mp4 file. Next, I uploaded this file onto Windows Movie Maker. I played around with the Visual Effects to see which effect I liked that portrayed a silent era style. I tried Black and White and also Sepia and went with Sepia just because the darks weren’t as dark and bleak and you could see more things clearly with Sepia.

Next was the most tedious part and took the most amount of time. I went through the whole two minutes of the video adding text to most of the video. When I had the part of the video where I wanted the text to go, I clicked Pause, and typed the text I wanted for that. I chose the Bella Donna font because I liked the old classic movie feel that it had to it. I adjusted the amount of time I wanted that particular text to remain on the video slide by changing the time. Different words I wanted to last longer and to be throughout several seconds so I kept those on the video longer. However, other words I didn’t want to last as long as I simpled chose to have it be for one or two seconds, and this also worked if I wanted to make the words come on and off the screen quickly so the viewer could process it like a spoken sentence.

That’s what took me most of the time. Next, I wanted to have a ragtime-y piano sound effect for the music used for my silent movie trailer. So I simply went to YouTube and searched “ragtime piano medley” and listened to a couple videos before deciding on this one. I liked how it was long enough to cover my two minute video and also I really liked the tempo, very upbeat and catchy. To convert it to mp3, I once again used the Video2mp3 website to convert the video to mp3. Next, I uploaded this file onto Audacity because there were parts in the beginning and end that I wanted to cut because it was the person sestting up on their piano and was unnecessary to include in my video. Once I trimmed these parts off, I saved it as a file, exported it, and then uploaded it to WMM. I made sure that it covered my video from beginning to end. Once it was added, I watched the whole thing through to make sure everything worked together and it did! So here is the final piece:

5 STARS

TOTAL STARS: 7/16