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So I saw this assignment and knew I had to try doing it. Unfortunately, Movie Maker isn’t the best at making this appear silent movie-y, but I tried my best. I went onto YouTube and looked around for random scenes from movies that I could possibly use. I ended up finding this one from Shrek:

It seemed perfect for this assignment. There’s some dialogue and some running away, the two staples of silent movies. I downloaded the scene and threw it into Movie Maker. Whenever there was some dialogue and then the shot changed, I inserted a title card to show the dialogue. I wanted to try using some actual title cards off the internet, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to insert them into Movie Maker. Instead, I just used an old timey font (Poor Richard to be specific), and hoped for the best.

I was able to use Movie Maker to make the whole scene in black and white, though I wasn’t able to add a filter that made it look like it was on some old film, which was disappointing. If I were to redo this, I’d want to figure out how I could add that in, since the grainy effect would do a lot for the final product. I also sped up the scene a bit, since it always seems like the action in silent movies is a bit faster than in real life. Lastly, I listened around on YouTube for some good silent movie music. I ended up finding one that I think fits the scene pretty well. I considered using several pieces of music, but I felt like that’d be a bit much for a scene that only clocks in at about 4 minutes.

Here’s the final product!