I thought I’d do my own video analysis, using a scene from Spike Lee’s 80s classic, Do the Right Thing.
I guess I’m looking at it more as an artist than a film scholar, but that’s my background. An interesting thing about it is that actor Bill Nunn’s speech is lifted almost verbatim from Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter.
I don’t think I’d try to make any kind of connection between the two otherwise, but I could see it as Spike Lee staking a claim in film history.
To put this together, I grabbed the clip from Youtube using a Firefox extension. I opened it up in MPEG Streamclip, exported some frames and trimmed the clip. I scrolled through it a couple times and wrote up some thoughts, then recorded a voiceover in Audacity. I used Audacity to clean up my voice and amplify it a bit, then I imported all the parts into iMovie. I used my frame grabs and the Modify=>Freeze Frame function in iMovie in parts. It looks like iMovie brightens the image or MPEG Streamclip darkens it, so that bit about yin and yang isn’t really visible. I used Cmd-B to make some splits in the video and the voiceover so I could get the parts aligned right and adjust the volume of the video. I uploaded to Vimeo just in case Youtube was going to give me static. Took 22 minutes to upload a 3 minute video. I think it actually sort of came out okay. I’ve got a long way to go before I’m at the Tony Zhou level though
