For this assignment, I chose to do the silent movie.

First, I had to choose a movie. I chose the trailer of Elf because I start watching Christmas movies right after Halloween (or during…). I picked the trailer because it gave such a good overview.  I downloaded it from youtube using iLivid, you just paste the URL in there and it will automatically download the video for you. Once the video was downloaded, I put it into Adobe Premiere. Here’s where it began to take about 6 hours to finish.

I had never really worked with Premiere and there is a HUGE learning curve. Finding out how to mute the track volume was not difficult at all, mainly because when you look to the bottom right of the program, it lists Video 1 and Audio 1. I simply muted the audio. The big problem came with those dang cue cards. I used ones that nearly everyone else I looked at had used. The hard part was figuring out what text to put on them. Once I decided, I tried to import them into Premiere. BIG TROUBLE! I could not for the life of me get these puppies to work right.

I took a deep breath and finally got them spliced in where I needed them, although it chopped up the video and at one point I had two of the same exact thing playing…anyway! (Also, please excuse the third one because it lasts wayyyyy too long but I did not know how to cut it down without messing up the entire video. I tried using the razor tool but it wouldn’t let me slide the rest of the video down to fill in the gaps…so it just leaves more time for the audience to read.) I went to the dropdown menu of video effects and added black adn white and noise by simply pulling those options directly on to the timeline thing of the video and audio. Once I got that mess straightened out, I pulled in the music from the soundtrack. I chose the nutcracker suite because it’s instrumental and it actually ended up going really well with the clip I selected (plus, it came from the soundtrack.)

After what felt like an eternity razoring the video and trying to get everything perfect, I decided to export the media as an mp4. I chose maximum render quality and it exported within a few minutes to my desktop. From there, I put it on youtube and then blogged about it here. Hooray!