I decided to do the Chipmunk Style video assignment, which requires you to take a pre-existing video or scene from a TV show or movie and either speed it up or adjust the clip so that it sounds like a chipmunk.

I knew that in order for this to be effective and hopefully humorous, I should select something involving characters with a deep voice. I decided that I would do Samuel L. Jackson’s reading of Go the Fuck to Sleep.

Here is the original version:

I downloaded this video using KeepVid and imported it into iMovie. Then I just used the audio effects to raise the pitch. The chipmunk effect is typically obtained through speeding up speech, but that speech is typically spoken at a slower rate so that it can be understood when it is sped up. I decided to adjust the pitch instead as that doesn’t affect the speed.

Here is one of the voice actors from the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks series showing how he has to say the lines so they can be edited and still coherent.

After doing the minimal audio editing, I exported it as a file and uploaded it to YouTube.

I think it’s really interesting to hear how much more humorous this sounds when there isn’t a deep voice reading it.