Monday 7 October 2013

The Headless Waltz

In keeping with the Headless theme I have used Movie Maker to create a small movie. Please remember that I am one of the few people who have not succumbed to the lure of Apple so I have no iPad, iPod or any iEquipment. I also have the distressing tendency to use freeware wherever possible.
So I made my first gif a few days ago and I have received some great feedback. Thank you so much! I decided to keep on with my headless theme (and also because Halloween is coming!) Now this movie was quite time consuming to do (time has no meaning in DS106), not so much because of the level of intricacy required (though the sound was tricky) but because of the amount of videos I had to watch to find snippets for the movie. I found the Headless Horseman Disney track first and used that as my base. Disney was a master of background art and it really shows as you watch the forest as the movie unwinds. I then added the sound track. It was only at the end of the production that I noticed that somehow the last 3 seconds of the song had been loped off when I downloaded it. I could have accidentally removed it while I was working on the movie for all I know. I ended up downloading the song again, editing it in Audacity and adding it to the end of the movie. You can hear where it doesn't quite mesh. The Victorian photographs I found here. The Victorians really were a gruesome lot.

As I was working on it, I was wishing that I had constructed it differently, particularly as the sound proved so difficult to balance. If I was redoing this movie, I would strip the sound off of each piece of video prior to adding it to the movie or I would have picked an instrumental soundtrack so that the sound from each segment of video could have been heard above the music. I also ended up inadvertantly doing a lot of research on Marie Antoinette which is why you see two pictures of her. Believe it or not, the naughty picture is the first one! Very interesting reading (and probably why this took soooooo long.)

The part I like the best in the movie? Where the crickets look like they are rubbing their legs in time to the music. If I was redoing this, I would cut the movie so that every time the violins start the crickets would be rubbing their legs. Cricket music!