My grandson Blaine is always wanting to make movies. It doesn't matter what the content medium he just enjoys the process of putting the pieces together and making it work. He is a little director in the making and his parents and I encourage his zeal. I don't always have enough time to work the whole production out but I try to make time when I can. We planned today earlier this week to do nothing but make a movie and post it to YouTube and Steemit. After countless video and audio clips we finally got a movie that we are happy with. We purposely made the movie with an off key soundtrack because we found it to be more humorous. The character was created by Blaine and the whole thing spun outward from there. I am sharing parts of the process so you might better understand what goes into even a short film clip.
We went to the playground around noon today to start getting the video clips we would need to pull this story together. It was slow going at first because Blaine was concentrating more on his costume than the production.
Blaine staring back at the camera in his mask. It was funny
after we put the movie together and noticed, as you will see,
his mask never makes an appearance in the movie.
He missed his mark a couple of times moving past his action point.
We spent about an hour at the park taking little video clips to splice together. It was a good time but I was hot and Blaine was hotter in that mask and cowl. All together we took fourteen video clips.
These are the clips. The Doritos pictures were used to make
the .gif transition you will see in the movie.
We did the editing in Windows Movie Maker. I have After Effects
but the windows program had everything we needed and it is
a good starter program for Blaine to learn editing on. Less
functional, more practical.
After we finally got all the clips cut an run together it was time for a soundtrack. We saved a copy of the movie and watched it to decide what was to be said and how many audio clips we would need. We recorded them on my phone and uploaded them to the computer so we could throw them on the project. This is where my only real problem with Movie Maker comes into play. Audio is a nightmare. With this project it wasn't so bad because we were putting this together in a campy foreign film kind of style, but generally speaking it is very difficult to line up audio in the program. Anyhow we took 12 audio clips and ran them into the movie project. Then we saved the movie a second time with the audio. Next we needed music. I always worry about copyright infringement with anything I post. Recording companies are very particular about their music being used. We found a very imaginative way to score our movie and it really added to the overall campy feel of the production.
We took Bennett's little guitar and laid it flat on a
table. Then we used the plastic stick to bang the strings
and body as we slid our fingers up and down the neck.
It really does work in the movie. I promise.
We took our saved movie, opened it back up in Movie Maker and added the music to the background. We were finally finished putting this piece of work together. Took about seven hours from start to finish. Posted it up on YouTube about eight o'clock.
This post has taken me about two hours to write with an intermission for homemade pizza. The fruits of our labor are below. If you enjoy the movie leave a comment. Blaine and I would love to read what you think either way. Thank You.
