After a loooong semester, the Cogdog himself decides to take a vacation…to the planet Mars! Watch him prepare for the long journey!

How he got to Mars with JUST Monopoly money I’ll never know.

This is the first remix video that I’ve done this week, and so far it’s my favorite because we can make our professor do silly things through MOVIE MAGIC! At first I tried to use Mozilla Popcorn to remix the video, but the problem was that it wasn’t running properly in any of my browsers. This was because the flash player on the site is a newer version of the flash player that I currently have on my computer. “But Amber, why not just update your flash player?” Welp…turns out the newest version of flash player only runs on Mac OS X 10.6 or higher; I only have OS X 10.5. “But Amber, why not just update your computer so you can get the new flash player?” In order to update my computer, I’d need to order the 10.6 package through the Apple website and have it sent to my parents house 2hrs away from me, since the school’s mail system is very unreliable. The process is extremely long, so I decided to create this remix my old fashion way, with my trusty sidekick Final Cut Pro.

The first thing I had to do in the video was to replace his blank laptop screen with a crazy highlight from this semester. This moment deserved the craziest thing I’ve ever done this semester, my Epic Instrument Woman video! Next, he wanted to listen to some tunes on his old fashioned record player. He explained how the song was oldschool, so I had to think “what do I like that’s also from his generation?” I ended up cranking up one of my favorite Mowtown oldies, “And the Beat Goes On” by The Whispers. Very fitting right! After that came some of the tricky stuff. Almost everything in the video that I added was done so by keyframe overlaying, which means you can overlay the original footage and edit each frame’s appearance by timecode. I’m not experienced enough to know how to crop out specifice designs from a rectangular image, other than the left, right, top, and bottom, which is why when I put the Mars image on the map, I couldn’t draw the map around his arm. However, I WAS able to crop out the left side of it when he moved the laptop toward it. This was also done on the laptop for a brief second with the Wikipedia page before the scene switched to the full laptop. This same keyframing nonsense went on for the rest of the video for any of the added images. In order to write on the grading page, I changed the duration of the screen by taking a screenshot of the page. I then used Final Cut’s typewriter function to create 3 typewriter tracks for my name, grade, and evaluation. (The “next Tarantino” joke has been something I’ve been saying the whole semester in my blogs!) The last scene was an actual panorama video of the planet Mars. I took this from a youtube video.

Some of you may be wondering “why Mars?” Well Mars is the final frontier and it’s WORTH exploring!! Sure it may take 10 months to get there, but once you’re there it’s a life changing voyage! That monopoly money he used was just enough to get him a round trip ticket, and even a complimentary stop on the moon! Hope he brings back souvenirs and an alien or 2.