Creating Video. . .Blunders

April 30, 2010

Patience is a virtue is what they tell me . . . so finishing up this video project has been one of the toughest things I have had to do throughout my college career. I have had a rough time with the video portion of this class. As I videotaped my 'shots' I thought that would be the most difficult part, I was sadly mistaken. Taping was quite easy; I made sure I had plenty of footage to cover what I wanted to demonstrate in my video. Then the most annoying thing in the world happened!!!!!!!!!!! The downloaded footage of my video was not able to be salvaged from my hard drive. Now I had to start from ground zero!!! (Yes, I am in tears as I am writing this)

One of the things that my husband doesn’t like about me is over preparing. (But thank goodness that I don’t listen to him about everything) I had started preparing a lesson for my students to review for their final exams on inferences. The concept is to have each student bring in a recipe, they would present it one ingredient at a time and the class would have to ‘infer’ what the dish would be. If the class has not ‘inferred’ the recipe by the last ingredient it is revealed to them. This gave me the grand idea to put a couple of recipes on video by showing the actual ingredients and preparing the dishes so that the kids can see the final product. Hence, the ‘Inference Café’ was put together in a time of crisis.

Now all I have to do is complete the editing portion of my footage. I am completely terrified of how the editing portion of this is going to work out.

May 2, 2010

After pulling out a significant amount of my hair. . .I had to make some 'adjustments' to my video project.  Once I downloaded my clips and transferred them to MovieMaker.  I lost all sound!!!!!!  All audio from the shoot was gone.  So I tried a couple of things, like using audacity, only to have the clips look like a bad martial arts movie.  So I tried to narrate over the clips and again the timing and flow of the video looked horrible.  So using a bit of improvisation, I used an upbeat clip of music and some pretty cool editing tools to make the flow of the video look sharp.  In an attempt to cover/modify the narration portion of the assignment I used captions on each slide.  I think my only saving grace is that this clip is for an inference lesson. . .therefore it makes it a bit more rigourous for my students, they have to rely on their critical thinking skills to follow the steps.  I get to play it tomorrow for them, so we will see what happens.