Tag Archives: Movie

#Movie Night!

20 Dec

​Gathers the shells AND holds your phone! The all-around perfect movie night companion!

Actually, #sunflower seeds are REALLY popular as a snack here in #China – my students always bring a ton to movie night 😜

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KDrama Review: The Grand Heist

3 Jan

Show Length

Full Length Movie

My Ratings

Theme Depth: ★★★
Uniqueness of Plot: ★★★★
Acting: ★★★★★
Technical Elements: ★★★★

Genres

Mystery
Comedy
Action
Historical

Plot

Hilarious tale of two men, one laid back, lazy, and of disrepute; the other straight-laced, strict, and generally lacking a good sense of humor.  It starts out a little bit angsty but quickly jumps back into humorous as the adventures ensue.  Basically, some of the nobles are trying to control the Ice Market, and by doing so control a great deal of money. They have worked towards this goal through thievery, treason, treachery, torture, and murder.  And our  one and a half heroes decide it’s time to put everything to a stop once and for all, especially given the threat the nobles are now posing to the young king fresh upon the throne.  Together they pull together a group of dastardly/hilarious criminals from all over Asia to put in place a plan that the enemy will never see coming. Definitely a great action/comedy watch that has a little bit for everyone!

My Thoughts

Excellent movie!
I always appreciate a unique plot; after a while if you’ve seen one Kdrama you start to feel like you’ve seen them all.  And while this one has the old “the nobles are evil and a heroes needs to defend the poor,” much of the story is pretty darn unique or at least uncommon.

Of course, I just loved the chemistry between the two male stars – they bounced off of one another spectacularly.  The straight man kept throwing off oddly perfect comedic moves, and the funny man would have strokes of gentle sincerity that worked perfectly.  It helped that I loved the entire rest of the cast as well.  They characters, their personalities, the collection – it all just worked for me.  I usually have at least one character that I’m less fond of, but here I really loved them all.

I also appreciate (as I’ve said many times before) the fact that the romance wasn’t the ENTIRE story here.  It was a side story that flowed perfectly into the rest of the film and only added to the comedy and action instead of detracting from it.   It wasn’t something that sprung upon our heroes at first sight either, there was at least a little foundation for the romance making the story require less of a “leave your brain at the door” feel   . . .

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How to Overlap Sound Recordings on Windows Movie Maker

11 Mar

Learned this process yesterday when making my educational Youtube video:

I created this video by making a recording of my voice, adding pictures, and then adding a music sound track.  Since the Movie Maker only works with one sound track at a time, it didn’t want to overlap my voice and the music at first.  It took a while, but I finally figured it out.  It’s surprisingly easy, but most of the instructions I found were outdated from the new Windows Movie Maker.  Consequently, I had to make it up as I went! 🙂  

Sound Recording 1

  • Create your project with just the first sound track. Add pictures, effects, etc. until it is complete. 
  • Go to File in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. Click it.
  • Now find Save Movie. it should be the sixth option in the list.  
  • Choose “Recommended for this project” 
  • Now it’s going to bring up the pop-up page that walks you through saving the movie.  Save the video.  This compresses the sound and video into one file.
  • Let it finish processing; the program will tell you when your video is done.  

Sound Recording 2

  • Close this project down.
  • Start a new project in Windows Movie Maker.
  • Under the “Home” tab, you’ll find “Add videos and photos.”  Click it.
  • Find your video with the first sound recording on your computer and add it to the project. This will import the video and sound as one file.  You cannot adjust the first sound recording now, but you can add another sound recording to it.
  • Now under the “Home” tab, you’ll find “Add music.”  Click that and add your second sound recording.   
  • Now you can play with the start times, end times, etc. to get it all perfect.
  • Go through the Save Movie process again, and voila! your video is finished with two sound recordings!

Sound Recording 3-~

  • Repeat the same process, compressing everything into one video file and then adding to it with each project.

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