Process

The first thing I did after I decided I wanted to use We Will Rock You was to look at the lyrics for the song. There are 157 words in the song, with 56 of them being completely unique. This meant, at the very least, I needed to find 56 audio clips. I found a website that transcribed a lot of speeches and linked to the relevant video, so I used google searches like ["barack obama" "rock" site:americanrhetoric.com] to find all the instances he has said rock. From there, I would have to tediously skim through the video (often 1 hour+) with only a relative idea of where the words were (no timestamps) and try to choose an instance he was articulating it clearly. From there, I would download the video and try to extract as many useful words from it as possible. I used 10 full speech videos in total. Then, I used ffmpeg to cut word segments of 1 second in length before moving the clips into iMovie (for ease of editing). This whole process took way longer than I ever imagined it would. The last part (aligning it with the original song), was also time consuming and not easy because some of the words did not turn out as clear as desired. Also, in these speeches, people tend to talk rapidly, meaning I had to use slow motion sometimes to make the word not be incomprehensible.