When I first came across this assignment, Return to the Silent Era, I didn’t want anything to do with it.  It looked really difficult, first choosing the movie, then figuring out how to edit the media so it looks old, and then adding title cards to display what the characters are saying. I passed the assignment and kept looking for another fun looking assignment to do.  While I was looking for another one to complete a thought came to my mind about doing 50 First Dates as the movie and maybe somehow mashing the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love, to create a silent era movie. I went onto youtube and found a trailer for the movie 50 First Dates and downloaded it onto my computer, using PwnYouTube to convert it to HQ MP4.

I then opened the movie clip in iMovie and started to play around with the effects. I first selected the whole clip then clicked on the inspector button where I changed the video setting to antique. I then went to the audio section in the inspector button region and turned the volume all the way down to 0% to eliminate the clip noise. I then watch the video and right clicked on the areas where I wanted to split the clip and then added in a text slide. I added a text slide by clicking on the button with a T on the right hand side of the screen. I added multiple clip slides through out the movie, helping the viewers to understand what was going on. I made sure not to put too many text slides into the movie, because I wanted to viewer to come up with some of their own assumptions when watching it. Once I completed adding the text slides I clicked on the button with the musical note and found the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. I dragged the song behind the video and watched the video to see how well it correlated. It ended up correlating well without me having to edit the music. I then went to the share button at the top and exported it. I pulled up youtube and uploaded it onto you tube with the tags VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376 and ds106.

Most silent movies use music without words, typically an orchestra was present at the showing of the movie and would play music as the movie played.  I thought by using a song with words that it would enhance the meaning of the movie a little more.  The song is about no matter how much you try to ignore someone or push someone away, there will always be someone that loves and cares for you.  The song related to the movie because Lucy, maybe not on purpose, would push Henry away, yet Henry always cared and was in love with her.  I chose this movie to place in an old time era, because the story is about how this guy is fighting for a woman he loves, which i feel is a traditional way of dating. Compared to society now, where I feel there is more promiscuity and it’s rare to find the perfect guy, this movie shows that there are still guys out there that have the old fashioned dating techniques.  WIth the movie portraying old fashion ways of a guy winning a girl over, i thought it would be perfect to put it into an old time era.

Assignment Details:
Return to the Silent Era (5 Stars)
(http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/return-to-the-silent-era/)
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.

One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search

Do this Assignment

If you complete this assignment, share it! If you are signed up with a blog that feeds the main DS106 site just use the following tags when writing the post on your own blog to have your example added below. (You must use BOTH tags!):VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376

If your blog is not connected to ds106, you can add your example directly.

2 Examples by other people are shown below….

Silent She’s the Man

Return of the (Almost) Silent Mean Girls

Both of these examples that I watched seeemed to fulfill the Silent Era movie requirements. I like the music that was used for the She’s the Man silent era remake, along with the placement of the script both above and below the movie clip. For the Mean Girls silent era remake I liked how the clip was sped up a bit and that the creator went outside the box and had parts where the characters’ were portrayed. I did find it difficult at times to read the script that was being used for the silent era movie, and I feel like the movie could have been a little more black and white in color. Overall though, the creators of both the silent era movie remakes did a good job and it was cool watching what they created.