There's Something About Harry

I wanted to see if I could remove the imagery of the movie Reservoir Dogs from the Song Stuck in the Middle with You. I liked the movie a great deal, and the song fits perfectly in the movie. I just wanted to see if I could deconstruct it a bit and build it back together into something else.

So I started with the music video from the band Steal Wheelers that actually made the song in 1972, the year that I was born actually.

I was originally inspired to try and make some statement about the role of social media in medicine inspired by an utter over at Utterz called Healthcare and Social Media It’s Coming Soon.

So I went about trying to come up with a video response for this Utterz comment. I was thinking to myself, that I could just envision what would happen in hospitals and doctors offices when people started wearing video cameras that record everything all the time (they exist, cost $200 and record 4 hours at a time).

So any way as I was getting into the lyrics of the song, it kept moving further and further away from the topic of medicine and its evolution and seemed to go towards politics and the evolution of politics in the US. We are probably actually stagnant in the US with a bit of devolution in politics.

I originally intended to put about 10 images into the video, trying to make a video response statement to Healthcare & Social Media its coming soon, but then the images in number grew and I had about 50 by the end of it.

I liked the end result, although there are a couple images in there of people in hospital waiting rooms in the modern day, in foreign countries and from 100 years ago, that probably don’t fit as well with the evolved theme.

The Steps to Creating a Mashup Video

So I had never put together a real mashup before. I’d taken video from cameras and put together the video with pictures and even put music or a sound track together. But it was typically something of a random slide show.

Downloading a video from YouTube and mashing it into something new was completely foreign to me.

Funny enough I had most of the software I needed as I had written a review and made a clickable mindmap of the software a couple months back, intending to do this then, but running out of time. The problem was that when I installed the software, it went on some obscure directory of my hard drive, and I couldn’t find it again. So I had to go back to my own article and find the software all over again, and try out the ones that I liked until I could download the video, convert the video from .flv to avi and separate the audio from the video, pushing the audio into MP3.

I used AVS Video Converter, which I had previously picked up because it also converts DVDs or mini-dvds (from my camcorder) into digital content that I can edit on my computer. (AVI, MP4, MPEG, MOV, WMV and more). I grabbed the program which does come with a free trial -wrote about that here.

The article with the clickable mindmap has a number of YouTube video download programs on it. The tool for a PC that I found the most useful was VideoGet.

I tried TubeSucker, but it kept dropping the right audio track.

Now when I mixed it all together, I used MovieMaker (free Windows program that comes with XP and Vista). Its easy and free, but a good bit limited on the surface because they keep it easy. I’m actually preparing to upgrade to new software, just hadn’t gotten around to ordering with an educational discount yet.

My wife is a teacher and I have kids in school so I qualify for lots of educational discounts!

I ran into an issue with MovieMaker. I had imported the video in originally in a windows media file format. This enabled me to mix everything in MovieMaker, but prevented me from burning it to a file so that I could publish it online.

AHHHHHHHH! 2 hours of work and I was stuck with a file I couldn’t use.

So I spent about 2 hours trying to fix the file, but that just locked MovieMaker up until it crashed. Ultimately, I had to remake the whole thing from scratch. I knew the final format, so did this and got the video produced in about an hour.

I published it first on Utterz and then on Revver where I can earn a little money whenever someone is interested in clicking on ads from the video. Mainly though I like the final quality of videos on Revver, it seems less grainy than YouTube videos.

The only thing I wish I had done differently is the placement of the image of Sgt Osvaldo Ortiz. It was important for the song to be placed where it was, but the way Revver works, that was the image that shows up when the player is showing but not playing. It makes the video look a little more somber than really is.