For my final assignment this week, I created a short animated trailer for an assignment I created, called “Create Your Own Animated Trailer.” I was inspired to do this by another assignment that had you create a western trailer on a whiteboard, but I wanted to take it a step further and try my hand at animating with my iPad! For this assignment, I used an app called Procreate. Procreate is a neat artistic app that is availably exclusively on iPad, and allows you to make just about any kind of art you want. At first I thought about trying to digitally recreate a Bob Ross painting (which I still might do!) but decided to try and use the animation features for this assignment. To animate using Procreate, you have to draw each frame by hand. I wanted this trailer to have a specific western noir-esque look, so I stuck to certain charcoal looking pens. I mainly used silhouettes to enhance that noir look. I actually drew all the silhouettes myself. You can use photos as references in Procreate, so I used them as references and drew them to look as similar as possible. I took me a long time to do this. I actually started on this project Saturday night and only finished Tuesday evening. The entire project was actually roughly eleven different project files in Procreate before I combined them together using iMovie. You can download animations in Procreate as MP4 files, which made making the video a lot easier. I also created still text slides, so it appears to emulate a silent film. I cannot take credit for the text, though. It comes from the intro of Red Dead Redemption 2, the video game that in-part inspired me to make this animation. The music also comes from RDR2 intro. I thought it fitting to use the haunting music that opens RDR2, because that game does not have a happy ending. I don’t imagine this having a happy ending either. Hopeful, maybe. But not happy. Like the silhouette animations, I made the text stills by using Procreate. The writing is my own, using a Logitech stylus to try my hardest to make it look elegant and fancy. Afterwards, I compiled everything in iMovie, adjusting the zoom and hover settings before adding the music. And that’s the final project! Tell me what you think down below! I know this probably isn’t my best work, but this is my first time doing something like this and I rather like how it turned out!

For my second assignment this week, I decided to complete the “Watching Movies With the Stereo On” assignment. Since my third assignment is going to be one that is worth quite a bit of stars (stay tuned!), I decided to do a smaller one to bump myself up to the ten star mark! This assignment was very easy. Pick a clip, mute the sound, add music, and publish! However, I wanted to pick a clip and a song that fit together. So I got to thinking and remembered one of my favorite fight scenes in a movie. Bruce Willis versus Karl Urban in RED (2010) is one of my favorite scenes, because Urban’s character is surprised when Willis sneaks into the CIA. The two fight, they both end up injuring each other badly, and it’s just hilarious because it shows how an old guy like Willis can still be awesome in a fight, while Urban’s character thinks Willis won’t be that much of an issue. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’d recommend it. RED stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous” and features Bruce Willis, a retired CIA agent, on the run after the CIA calls a hit on him. The movie is full of action and doesn’t take itself seriously, making it an excellent comedy as well. In order to do this assignment, I had to first download the clip I wanted to use. Thankfully, YouTube is a goldmine when it comes to these things, and I found a clip that didn’t cut too much of the scene out. The old VLC-Codec trick came in handy here (basically it decodes the video and lets you download it) and I was soon free to start editing. I used the Windows Video Editor. One thing I’d like to point out is that the movie already has a song playing in this scene, Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle Again.” The song is faint, and it cuts out when the camera isn’t on the fight. I wanted to take that song and make it the most prominent thing in the video. Thankfully, I own a copy of the song because I have Aerosmith’s Devil’s Got A New Disguise album, which has this song on it. I simply ripped it from the CD and uploaded it to the video. I messed around with the song a bit, so the guitar would really kick in when Willis throws the table, and then tested to see how it played with the rest of the visuals. I really like how it turned out. I think it makes the scene a little funnier too, especially since the song kind of emphasizes Willis’s experience in these matter and implying Urban is a bit of a rookie. Plus the meaning of “back in the saddle” really fits the theme of the movie! Give it a watch! Tell me what you think in a comment down below!

For my first assignment of the week, I wanted to create something that people love yet is very controversial on YouTube: a lyric video. This is the “Create A Lyric Video” assignment from the DS106 assignment bank. I decided to start off with this assignment since it is worth a whopping four and a half stars and I am doing the second option we were given for the week that involved us completing tens stars worth of assignments. The song I decided to create a lyric video for is “Tuff Enuff” by the Fabulous Thunderbirds (1986). I first heard this song while driving home from work one night, listening to old reruns of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. American Top 40 began in 1970 and played the top forty hits from the Billboard charts. There are a few radio stations in Richmond and Fredericksburg that replay the 1980s countdowns, and involve Kasem telling stories about the artists on the countdown, playing long-distance deductions (that arrived by snail-mail), and taking a look back at the 1950s and 1960s at times. I listen to American Top 40 because I love 1980s music and culture, and listening to it is almost like being transported by to the 1980s. I remembered this song in particular because it was one I had somehow never heard before, and I know a lot of ’80s songs. Kasem told a story about the drummer, Fran Christina, and how the Canadian Mounties had to go find him for the band, which was amusing. Then, I forgot the song and the drummer’s name. I spent a month searching for the song before finding it again, and I plan to never let it go! To start off, I tried my hand at creating a presentation that would sync up with the music and highlight text as the corresponding lyrics were sung. I thought it was great, but it failed when I tried to record it. However, I was not deterred! I decided to try and do something with the official music video, which is colorful and amusing in itself. I downloaded the video from YouTube using the VLC Media Player Codec trick (which I won’t describe here, on the offhand chance they try and patch it) and uploaded the video to the Windows Video Editor. I’d like to point out Windows Video Editor and Windows Movie Maker are two different things, and unfortunately Movie Maker is not compatible with my computer. The Video Editor can be found within the Photo Editor, which is both confusing and surprising. I also have OpenShot, but it’s a bit finicky, and did not have the proper tools for what I did to the video. The Video Editor has split and trim tools that let you look at it down to the second. Basically what I did was go through the video, and every time I heard a verse, slit the video. I did this for every verse. This took a long time, since the Video Editor is not that precise and I had to be very precise with my mouse. The result played effortlessly, like the original video, but now I could go through and add animated text for the lyrics without them overlapping. Adding the lyrics was simple, but time consuming. I Googled the lyrics, despite knowing them by heart. I wanted to make sure I had them correct and added them one by one to each of the split sections. Plus, I had to ensure they started and stopped at appropriate times, which took some adjusting in the settings. I wanted it to look cartoonish and used a subtitle option called “Joy” that let me use the colorful subtitle fonts. I personally think it makes the lyrics look more alive as the video plays. A final thing I did was tint the video lightly, using a filter called “Sunset” to make the colors pop out a little more to compliment the lyrics. Now all that was left was to upload it to YouTube. As I’m sure we are all aware, DMCA takedowns can be a pain, meaning videos you upload to YouTube can be blocked, taken down, or have segments removed if they infringe copyright. You are supposed to be able to use copyrighted media for educational use (like in this class), but YouTube doesn’t allow you to identify whether or not your video is educational or not. I seem to remember there being a place to identify that, but I couldn’t find it when uploading this. Thankfully, YouTube let me leave it as unlisted without removing any of the visuals or audio, despite it being blocked just about everywhere. If this is no longer the case at the time of anyone watching this video, please let me know. I can always upload it to Vimeo if something happens. Please leave a comment down below and tell me what you think!