my my desk desk - second video assignment

My second video is up!
I knew I wanted to do a stop motion for one of my videos, so I decided I would do it by moving things around on my desk. I'm pretty happy with the outcome, and aside from being a pretty long process (I was taking pictures for about 2 hours), it was relatively easy and very fun.
I started off by taking pictures of things moving from place to place. I used PhotoBook on my MacBook because that's one of the only available cameras I have. The thing about stop motion is that you have to move things just a little amount, a lot. This was rather tedious, but I really like the end result. The hardest part was when all of the objects make a circle and then disappear from the desk.
After all the pictures (about 145 of them) were taken, I uploaded them to iMovie where I added in the music, messed around with the timing of each picture, and added in title screens. I was a little disappointed with how short the video ended up being - I didn't know so many pictures were required for stop motion! Looking back at movies that use stop motion (Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas; Corpse Bride, etc.), I now realize movies like that must have taken so so long to make...it really blew my mind.
I'm pretty happy with the outcome of my project and hope you enjoy it too. Let me know what you think!

MY FIRST VIDEO

Alright, so I finally completely my first video assignment. I'm very excited about it! I got the idea to do this video ever since I was first introduced to the "Will it Blend?" videos by Tom Dickerson. My process was rather tedious, but I ended up really enjoying the whole film editing aspect of the project.

I started off by having to download Tom's "Will It Blend"videos from YouTube - not an easy feat. Only certain videos worked on my computer, the .mp4 file wasn't the right format...it was a little bit of a nightmare. I ended up being able to download a couple of videos so I could edit them, and uploaded them to iMovie.
I'm actually really surprised by how easy it is to edit video on iMovie - one of my favorite things about Apple products is how easy they are to use, which I could go on about for hours, so I'll just focus on iMovie for now. Anywho, iMovie makes it easy to clip, trim, copy and paste clips exactly to where you want them, which in turn makes it so easy to get the end product that you really want. I haven't really used iMovie since the old, old version (I don't remember which one) in middle school, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by the new interface.
I started off by using some ready-made text screens in iMovie, then edited the clips to make them shorter, copying and pasting each one in order to get each small part of the clip to work together. I added in some music and transitions by simply dragging them onto the project surface, moving them to where I wanted, and that was it. There you go! You have yourself a mini-masterpiece. Really happy with iMovie and I look forward to making more (maybe better, more refined, more interesting, more serious...) videos!

V I D E O Z

CC: Flickr User la_salebete

Once upon a time, in middle school, I was a video-making fiend.
My friends and I would make music video excerpts, funny stories, and random videos of anything we could think of. Luckily, all (or most) trace of these videos have been deleted off the face of the earth, hidden somewhere inside the deep dark corners of my old green iMac, unplugged and sitting in my storage room, far away from here.
Since then, I haven't done a lot with video. In fact, the introductory video post was the first video I had filmed in a long time, and the Tongue Twister video was my first YouTube upload since those many years ago. It's rather unfortunate that I gave up on video a while ago, because directing, filming and especially editing are things I used to be pretty in to. But alas, times do change.
In the video unit of this class (which I was unaware of up until we talked about it in class), I hope to experience with making video from already pre-recorded videos and editing them - maybe like the "Silent Star Wars" video we watched in class (I think I just used the word video 4 times in one sentence). Although I don't know how to do that, I'd be interested in learning how to take pre-recorded film and changing it in a new artistic way - because isn't that what today's form of creativity is all about? Beyond coming up with my own ideas for video making, I want to steal someone else's and make something completely new out of it; just call me a copycat.

Six Slick Sticks...

First YouTube video feat. Alyssa Natoci

Tongue Twister + Video with a friend!