Synopsis:
My goofiest idea was my strongest idea! Hermann and Pierre are two players at a local theater troupe. Hermann has been there longer, but Pierre is a charismatic and kind new lead who commands the respect and admiration of everyone he meets. Hermann seethes and develops a tragicomic plan of sabotage… but will he have a change of heart?
Production software:
I assembled the entire project in OpenShot, which I developed an early preference for in the course while comparing it to Shotcut. The intuitive method of dragging and dropping images, audio, and video in sequence was perfect for this project which called for juxtaposition. Juxtaposed with the old videos of Shakespeare interpretations were pictures and a video of ceramic clowns as actors, taken by me on an Android phone and edited within OpenShot.
One of the greatest challenges was abandoning the attempt to import oval transparencies into the video editor, instead choosing to use rectangular pictures which were only partially saturated in mono to match the background videos. One of the background videos had green, purple, red, etc. film instead of being entirely in black and white. Like Nosferatu, sometimes different colors were used to depict different settings or times of the day. I edited the movies to be uniform in saturation, although they could not be uniform in quality.
Audacity was a good tool for audio recording. I recorded Hermann’s pieces with my webcam mic and Pierre’s pieces with a donner podcard mic which has built in reverb and equalization for variety and clarity of speakers.
Credits:
Video:
“Hermann The Jealous Thespian” was created by Paul Griffith and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Footage of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth (1937) by National Film Preservation Foundation and is licensed in the Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal.
The Taming of the Shrew (1908) by Library of Congress is licensed in the Public Domain.
The Tempest (1908) by Percy Stow is licensed in the Public Domain.
Audio:
Audionautix-com-ccby-renaissance by Audionautix.com is licensed by CC BY 3.0 Deed
Snowflake- Like Music (Renaissance) by Snowflake (Emily Richards) is licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed.
72844 lonemonk approx-800-laughter-and-clapter-1 by Freesound.org is licensed by CC BY 3.0 Deed.
Dialogue and Narration were recorded in Audacity.
