This is What We Did in Our Class

Boogie Nights Mashup Reflection

Kyle Stevens


Kyle Stevens discusses juxtaposition and complementarity in mashups.

Transcript

[00:00]

One of the first projects that we were assigned in our class was the movie mash-up, in which we took two different movies or types of media and overlaid them together to compose a new piece that was a combination of the two.

Upon being assigned this, I had just finished watching the movie Boogie Nights, and I thought that this would be one good extreme for my mash-up because Boogie Nights is a very adult-oriented movie with mature thematic elements.

[00:30]

[Clip plays]

[00:58]

Now that I had one movie picked out for my mash-up I needed another movie to mix it with, and since Boogie Nights is a very adult-oriented movie I thought that a child-oriented movie might create good contrasts, and immediately my mind jumped to Disney, but I needed a Disney movie that paralleled the themes expressed in Boogie Nights, a story about someone who is trying to become all that he can be, a hero protagonist . . . so then I thought of Hercules, in which Hercules strives to become a god like his father, Zeus.

[01:30]

[Clip plays]

[01:52]

Now it was time to mix the two texts together. I took the sound from a Boogie Nights theatrical trailer and cut and pieced together animated clips from the movie Hercules; mechanically this entailed me ripping the sound file from the trailer using the website zamzar.com and ripping the entire DVD of Hercules to my computer via a program called NERO, which I used also to compose my video.

[02:15]

By the end of my first draft, I was pretty pleased with the outcome, I felt that the lips and voices synched up nicely.  Also, mixing the two pieces helped me think about the story that I was telling.  The narrative in the Boogie Nights trailer had to be reflected in the animated clips I chose from Hercules to give the piece a fluid, realistic feel to it; choosing and editing clips to correlate to the audio narrative helped me revise the message of the trailer and of the film.

[02:45]

At the end of my mash-up I decided to add my own touch of personal flair. I made my own movie poster for my combined movie. I took a Boogie Nights poster, edited out the people in the star and pieced in a picture of Hercules using the program Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo, and I felt that this gave an even more realistic and believable feel to my mash-up and really tied the two items together.  My personal tweak ended up strengthening the mixing of the project.

[03:15]

Upon submitting my first draft, the feedback I received mainly pertained to tweaking and tightening in certain areas, so I took this into consideration while revising and tried to match the sound up to the moving lips a little bit better. But my main concern was with a 5 second pause of black screen that I had at the beginning.

This pause was distracting so I thought about what I could add as a filler for that black screen.

I couldn’t think of any clips that I felt would fit well in that position, so what I ended up doing was mimicking a typical movie preview screen and altering it to say, “The following preview has been deemed as a mash-up of two separate movies for an English project.” And at the bottom I put our class’ website.  Again, I started with a personal touch but the end result was a more cohesive project.

[04:05]

And here is the final draft of my mash-up.

[Mashup plays]

[05:50]

All-in-all, by the end of my final draft I was very pleased with my mash-up.  I realized that a mash-up needs contrasts, but also similarities.  Working with these qualities helped me create a new composition, an ironic one given the nature of the individual films.

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