The Night Time is the Right Time :
The Movie 11.6 MB, requires quicktime 7

Making of the movie:

Various scenes were taken with a DV camcorder. These were downloaded to a Mac computer via firewire cable using the program iMovie.

The different clips were moved from the iMovie folder to a new folder on the desktop. Then they were imported into the program Final Cut Pro version 3 (browser panel).

The time lapse sequence was taken from the window of the Grass Labs using an Epson 3100z digital camera, one of the few that has a time lapse function. Apparently, there aren't any current digital cameras that can do this. One problem with the time lapse sequence was that at night, the reflection of the room lights spoiled the sequence, so that we got to see what the Grass fellows do at night! However, eventually they went home and turned off the room lights. To get around the problem, we used the dawn part of the sequence and ran it backwards for the movie.

The music "Night Time is the Right Time" by Ray Charles was bought and downloaded using iTunes. It was surprisingly difficult to transfer it to Final Cut. In the end, we opened the mp3 file in Quicktime Pro and exported it as a sound only movie. This allowed us to import it into the "browser".

We then started putting clips etc into the time line. The time lapse sequence went first, and we had to reverse the direction as described above. This was done using Modify: Speed in the menu. We put in the sound track to start as the time lapse sequence got dark. The student clips were put into the video line. To crop them, we used the "razor blade" tool, which is very crude and doesn't make use of the fancy editing tools of Final Cut, but we've never managed to learn them.

To make the scrolling "credits" was somewhat complicated but this seems to be how we did it: in the browser window, select Windows: Effects from the menu. Look down and find the folder Video generators and choose slug and drag it onto the time line. Then activate slug, select filters tab in the viewer window. Go back to Windows: Effects window, find the folder Video generators and drag "scrolling text" to the viewer: filters window just opened. Then type in the names, specify font and size. Scrolling speed can be controlled by going back to the time line, finding the slug and dragging one edge of it to either elongate it or shorten it's total length of time.

When it was finally done (it is relatively easy to get a rough draft, but takes a long time to get a final version), export as a final cut movie, and burn to DVD using iDVD.

"Untitled" (we forgot to make one!)
The Movie 15.2 MB, quicktime 7 required

At the end of the Molecular section, the students filmed lots of different scenes. Verena coordinated the shooting from a general script by her, Cindi, Heidi, Sarina, and Tian-Yi (and probably others) around the idea of a day in the life of a neurobiology course student. The scenes were assembled into the movie by Mark, who had purchased a new version of Final Cut (Final Cut Express HD) and learned several new techniques such as "ripple edit" and the use of "marks" to synchronize video and audio.

One of the highlights - Heidi and Cindi suggested the use of the Rocky theme for Matt's exercise scene; we could only find a latin version on the iTunes store, but this had several fortuitous musical transitions which exactly matched the video sequence.