DS107 CARNAGE from Jim Groom on Vimeo.
A trailer for a film not yet made….
Take the jump for an overview of the process, thoughts on why iMovie 8 sucks, and a bit about Mario Bava.
I actually got the idea to edit a foreign language trailer after watching how much fun Shannotate had with her Downfall remix. I was having a bit of trouble finding the perfect trailer and started to think about the psychedelic, tripped out trailer for Mario Bava’s 1971 mother-of-all-Slasher films Carnage (a.k.a Bay of Blood a.k.a Twitch of the Death Nerve). It is a favorite film of mine, just as Mario Bava is a favorite director of mine, this blog owes its name to him. If you watch the original Carnage trailer you’ll realize there isn’t really that much to change, the horror scenes are posterized, and the actor titles are stark, while the film’s title—which is repeated over and over again—is tripped out and consuming. Watching it again it dawned on me that I could make some very subtle edits to this trailer to keep the psycho killer/slasher theme going for the ds107 philistines. I really like how subtle the changes are, and how they bring the players of ds107 to the fore once again. It isn’t perfect, but I am pretty happy with it.
Now, here comes my rant on how much iMovie 8 sucks. What I did was rather straight forward in terms of video editing. I added “DS107” in front of the Carnage titles and changed the original actors names to represent a sampling of the ds107 separatists. Should be a dead simple project even in a rudimentary tool like iMovie 8, right? Wrong, cause iMovie 8 sucks, and when they went from iMovie 6 to iMovie 8 they basically gutted this software, some of which they brought back in iMovie 9 and 11. So, what am I bitching about? Well, the following:
- iMovie 8 does not allow me to use more sophisticated titles with effects. In fact, iMovie 8 got rid of almost all the effects–slow motion, black and white, etc.
- It also removed the ability to pull the audio track out of the video and edit accordingly.
Those are just two of the issues that I faced when worked on my simple project that made this software a pain in the ass. And what’s more I never got iMovie 9 or 11 on my computer because they are not free upgrades, you have to buy iLife which also sucks. OK, so there that is, for a longer list of why iMovie 8 was so abysmal search the internet it is well documented, I just happened to have to work through it tonight.
So, with no real freedom to choose title effects I couldn’t reproduce Bava’s brilliant title effects. I had to stick with centered, lower third, align left and align right…a paltry selection. What’s more, I had to cut out pieces of the video with names of the original actors and replace them with still images that fit the space I had cut out with the new titles. But it turns out I couldn’t do this cleanly because when I cut the clip the audio was also gone because you can’t extract the audio from the video in iMovie 8. LAME!!! Adding insult to injury, it took me a good half an hour to figure out that in order to copy a bit of a still and create a sequence that is 0:xx.x seconds long I have to right click the original sequence and click “Add still frame to project” which I then had to change the time by going to Edit—>Change Duration. That was annoying, why can’t I just make certain clips longer? So, I had to add the titles with basic tools, and re-synch the entire music score for the trailer after all my edits were done. What a sucky workflow! No question that the logic behind iMovie 8 was to get more people to buy Final Cut Express. A program I really do want to start playing with for more complex projects after seeing what Michael Branson Smith has done with that stuff, but not for basic editing that is a result of Apple’s denigration of a program that in many ways got me into video editing back in 2004. It was once pretty good.
Anyway, that is my process and it was unnecessarily time consuming because I have iMovie 8. I was gonna wait to use iMovie 11 at work some time this weekend or Monday, but I know that would be a nightmare of piling up work. Plus, I have an idea for another video project which will require Final Cut Pro Express, so time to get a bit more serious despite Apple sucking.
Hey, I got a starring credit this time, hell yeah! And who exactly was partaking in that love scene, or perhaps we don’t want to know.
Seriously though, it must be very painful to have to go between iMovie 8 and iMovie 11 like that. I held onto iMovie 6 for a couple of years after “switching” to 8, but eventually gave it up in favor of iMovie 9. In many ways Apple has managed to turn down the suckage since then.
Going back to your trailer, not only do you have the most morbid taste in movies (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), you can an uncanny knack for picking and remixing just the right content, especially when it comes to mayhem. I’m curious what your childhood must have been like.
I was wondering why I was not able to make my movies black and white, I thought I remembered iMovie being much more fully featured before.
Kind of reminds me of Johnny Quest.