Wow, what a masterpiece. In all seriousness, there are a lot of things I could have potentially executed better. Before I get into that though, allow me to talk a little bit about the texts I remixed.

For my video, I went the route of the given example video “Shining” (The remix of “The Shining ” set in a romantic comedy style trailer), and remixed the film “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” to mimic the style of a horror movie trailer. As guides I used the trailers for “It” and “Cabin in the Woods.” These trailers used intense music, foreboding scenes of suspense and violence, and ominous title graphics to induce moods of fear and adrenaline. While I didn’t actually sample directly from these texts, the music that I used from the video “Dark Action Trailer Music” seemed to fit the theme of the typical horror trailer well enough that it could have substituted for the music in the “It” and “Cabin in the Woods” trailers. For this reason, I deemed it a worthy text to remix with the Harry Potter film.

I chose to remix “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” because I view it as a text with pretty interesting atmosphere and tone. While it’s definitely a piece of children’s media situated firmly in the fantastical genre of children’s fantasy, some pretty dark things happen in this film. There’s an ominous message smeared on the walls in blood, Hermione gets petrified, Harry and Ron get attacked by the whomping willow and a horde of spiders, and there’s a giant snake monster prowling the depths of the school waiting for the right moment to strike. I felt that I had a lot of darker elements in this particular movie to play with, and thought that remixing this film would help bring these often glossed-over themes to the fore-front.

As for what I could have done better, I think some of the captions stay on screen for too long–especially at the beginning. The part with Ron and the spider still irks me. I can’t tell if it’s the lack of audio or the choppiness, but it’s something. Obviously my sound mixing is off, and I could stand to include more sinister clips from the film. Maybe more of the basilisk itself! I also think my clip suffers from not defining a main antagonist like so many horror movies do. I think if I worked more on it, I might be able to frame the teachers as evil as Snape and Filch do a pretty good job of acting intimidating towards a gang of 12-year-olds.

Really quick, I’d also like to talk about what’s up next! I think I might do an ARG WordPress game where you, the player, would be someone who stumbles across the blog of this missing girl. Her parents have left a note saying that their daughter is missing, and they’re leaving the blog up just in case anyone can find any hidden clues. The girl (Emily, I’m thinking of calling her), wrote poetry, so the clues for finding out more about her story will be nestled in her poems. I was THINKING about having a lot of her posts be password protected, and the fun come from solving these passwords through reading her poems, but that doesn’t seem wholly exciting enough. Thoughts? Suggestions? Is there a platform for a fake blog that might work better than WordPress?

Music:

Trailers:

Hi Dr. Boessen and DNN classmates! This my submission for the gif portfolio exercise. I ended up making two because I couldn’t decide between them! The first one comes from the movie Freaky Friday (2003).

In case you haven’t seen Freaky Friday, the movie centers around the hijinks that ensue after a quarreling mother and daughter mystically swap bodies on a day that holds very important events for the both of them. In the scene I made this gif from, they’re attempting to merge back into the right bodies by running really fast into each other. The tone of this movie is really playful and upbeat, so I thought capturing this bit of slapstick comedy in repeating gif form was a good representation of the film as a whole.

The next gif comes from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and is a bit sadder.

There’s going to be spoilers for the ending to both the movie and the novel versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, so if you were planning on watching or reading either of them maybe stop here. I think the spoilers are pretty minor, though. Basically, the scene this gif comes from appears at end of the movie when the main character, (Holly Golightly), kicks her beloved cat out of a taxi to prove another character that she’s not beholden to or dependent on anyone. She regrets her decision and goes to search for Cat, (that’s its name), in the rain. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Holly’s about to go open that large box on the left and find a damp orange tabby. But if you’ve read the book, you know that doesn’t happen. In the novel, Holly wanders around in the rain for a long while but ultimately isn’t able to find Cat. I thought my gif was a little bit more representative of the novel’s tone. The colors suggest a sadness to the scene, washing the alley in dreary grays, blues, and browns. From the image itself, it’s a search for something that never reaches fulfillment as Holly will continually loop back to checking the stack of boxes.