Thursday, December 19, 2013

Video Mashup Project


 DISCLAIMER: Please drink responsibly, or get punched in the face by a chicken!

At first, I was thinking of making a video mashup of my kids playing sports. I have a lot of home video of them playing football and hockey. Then I was introduced to Archive.org. This website opened up a bunch of possibilities. I thought of a couple of different ideas right away, but decided on making a video mashup that reflected my blog. Plus, doing a search for "beer" resulted in a lot of material. I looked through a variety of videos, and found some really striking clips (hopefully, they will stand out), and used them to base my video around. The clips I found relating to beer, consisted mainly of vintage black & white movies, and cartoons (why is that??). I primarily used my song that I created using Soundation, and built the video to move along with it. I created my video mashup using my Macbook Pro and iMovie HD. It's a little dated, but it got the job done. I liked it because it functioned very similar to Soundation. I edited the clips to move and change with the song. I wanted the video mashup to be fun and infectious, albeit a low-brow homage to beer, beer drinking, and merry-making. I believe I was successful with this video. The movement of the different clips flow pretty well with the music, and the transitions hit the beats as close as I can make them. The overall theme is apparent right to the end, which is the only possible outcome when drinking and merry-making get out of hand (see my disclaimer).

If I could change anything it would be to add smoother transitions between the clips in the video. The music itself is fast paced and quick moving, so I did not use the built-in video transitions in order to keep the video in sync with the beat of the music. I think adding more of the smoother transitions to the mashup would have given the music and video better synergy. Also, I'm not too keen on the singing pig part, but I wanted to keep it nutty (because nutty = good). ;)

The most difficult part about completing this assignment is completing this assignment! I can't stop tinkering with it! What you see here on my blog is the seventh or eighth rendition of the video mashup. I kept on wanting to rearrange a scene, or fix a transition. Also, it was difficult to match up the video clips with the music, and to get the transitions to hit just right. I found if I added a built-in video transition it threw the video off from the music and I had to fix it (again). It became tedious.

Even though this project was very meaty, and I spent way too much time "perfecting" my video, I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. For years I've had iMovie on my laptop, and never once looked at it. Now I feel I can create a whole movie! It took some time at first going through the tools of iMovie but once I read the manual, I was able to use iMovie very effectively.

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