Hagan Creates His Own Silent Movies With The "Peanut Gallery"

Tonight Hagan and I tried out something new.  We had so much fun!   

It is called Peanut Gallery and it is a Chrome Experiment.

This awesome tool lets you add intertitles within old film clips using your voice.  You speak over the clips and the Web Speech API in Google Chrome turns your words into text.

We looked up a little background on silent films and intertitles in Wikipedia. We found, "Intertitles, then known simply as "titles", were a mainstay of silent films once the films became of sufficient length and detail to necessitate dialogue and/or narration to make sense of the enacted or documented events."

Hagan and I wondered why it was called "Peanut Gallery" so we went to the "About" page on the website.   How fun!  We think it sounds like a fun place to sit in the theatre....

and gave Hagan (and all young people) a real reason to make these little films funny and a little bit colorful themselves.

To start, one selects a film clip to begin.  There are several to choose from as you scroll back and forth at the bottom of the screen. 

To start you just have to say something....like "Action". 

As the film clip plays, you say the words aloud that you want as the intertitles.  

There is no typing....this is all done for you with voice. 

It was pretty tricky to get all of the correct words that we said within the intertitles.  We found a few tips on the "About" page of Peanut Gallery.  This was helpful as we create the next silent film.  

Once the silent film is complete, one can change the title by clicking on it.  

I love what Hagan renamed his silent film....

The Hunchback of Van Meter.  That is great, Hags.

When Hagan was all finished,  he saw that he could share it several different ways.

We shared it on my Facebook page and you can also share it on Google+,  Facebook, and by simply sharing the url.

Hagan also wanted to share one of his silent films in this post, so we used Camtasia to capture the video and upload it to YouTube.  It was really easy to do and then it can be uploaded, embedded, and share through YouTube as well.

I can see the Peanut Gallery being used for all kinds of projects.

Film class studying silent films.  Historical events.  Creative writing. Just for fun.

The list goes on.

I know that Hagan and I will be coming back to this tool for more fun and creating too.