This should be the last piece of media for my Dorothy ds106 story. I have been wanting to the dialog mashup assignment since I heard the first examples from listening to the stellar examples from The Truth’s episode of Movie Mashups:
As demonstrated by the Movies Mashup episode of the radio show The Truth, take two different movies and extract the dialogues scenes of actors form each, then re-edit them to create a story as if the characters from different movies were in the same conversation.
Listen to examples from the show including The Terminator and Legally Blonde (“Terminally Blonde”) and from the TV shows that become “The Sopranos in the West Wing.”
The challenge is to take two different movies, slice up the audio for different characters in each, and then re-edit them as if there were having a coherent dialogue.
That should be about 92 stars.
I knew my Oz example would be when Dorothy first lands in Oz “We’re not in Kansas anymore” and where she meets Glenda and the munchkins:
I went through a lot of gyrations to find the companion piece. it would need to eb something that involved someone talking about going to a place (since she mentions not being in Kansas) and ties in to her denials of being a witch. I had this idea of finding a 1960s travel film, since I felt the colors and weird people of Oz were right out of the hippy era.
For some reason I came back several time to Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, notably his Robert Dupea character’s over the top end around in the diner to get that waitress to give him his ” omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.”
Its such a classic playing out of tension.
I was not sure how they would work, but just decided to put it together. Here is what I ended up with (along with a merged image of Dorothy and Robert):
What I wanted was for Dorothy to have a confrontation in Oz that would set her into confusion, does she want to be there or Kansas? Dupea messes with her, yells, throws things, and maybe even abuses her.
I made this by downloading both of the segments as mp4 using PwnYoutube. I imported them directly in Audacity. For each track, i separated out the phrases the lead character says by using thee Edit->Clips -> Split tracks command, and deleting the other stuff. I end up with little fragments that I can slide around or copy paste, and more less got luck assembling them:
There has to be some gaps between people talking (like real conversation, pacing, etc), but these sound weird if there is silence between them.
So I took some but of music from OZ, about 3 seconds, and pasted it back to back in a new channel. I copied it end to end, reversing a few sequences, and dropped the amplitude to it is background. I did the same from the Five Easy Pieces scene, using a few seconds of diner crowd noise in the beginning. This lower background gives the audio a bit of texture.
I cannot say this is nearly as good as the examples I heard from “the Truth” – this is one of those assignments that really take a lot of work and/or a lot of familiarity with dialogue to do it up.
But it was fun to try.
Addendum: The Nicholson scene takes place in a Denny’s on I-5 here in Eugene. I pass it every day on the way to work. How many degrees of separation? This really is a cool project. You managed to make the dialogue between Dorothy and Robert fraught…fraught, I tell you! with sexual innuendo and a slight cast of understated menace.
What a cool Denny’s! I read that a lot of the video was also shot in BC.
Yes, I know some of the implications in the audio, thats the open endedness of audio. I am not saying if there was a real intent.