Notice how the title went from a question mark to a period? Yeah, well that’s because now I consider myself a videographer. These past two weeks have been nice. It is nice to be able to spread your assignments out over two weeks so you aren’t as stressed trying to get them all in in one week. I have been able to accomplish a lot nonetheless. I ended up doing one assignment too many–but that was the first one that I did and I was just having fun with it, so oh well. I also was able to get in my last two discussions about The Wire episodes and those were fun and interesting, as usual. I was also able to do my Swede of an episode (with Stefanie and with the help of my wonderful boyfriend and an awesome teammate) and my video essay. And heeeere they are:
Daily Create #1: Experimenting with Water
I did yesterday’s daily create, “Take us an experimental water photo.” I thought about it all day because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to take a splashing one but I didn’t know how or where. Then I remembered that I have some vases that I could use and I figured a quarter would make a pretty cool splash. Rather than trying to take a picture of the splash (I may have been there all night) I took a video of it and decided to screen shot the part that I thought looked good. The first could of times I went through the video by playing it and trying to pause it when the splash looked good. The problem with that was that it was a two second video so pausing it exactly on the right time was nearly impossible. Then I realized I could pause it and scroll through the video frame by frame, allowing me to pick exactly the frame I wanted to capture. I ended up with the following:
To me it almost looks like an atom bomb just went off. I liked this picture because you could see the splash and you could still see the quarter that made the splash. The quarter also looks huge which is kind of cool. Anyway I’m happy with how it turned out.
Video Assignment #1: My Favorite Vacation?
For my first video assignment this week I decided to start out easy. I did “It’s Vacation Time” (2 stars). I chose this not because I had a favorite vacation but because I love going back and looking at vacation pictures and making a video is an easy way to do that. I love all of my vacations equally. There are certain aspects of all of them that I like, so I don’t really have a “favorite” per se. I liked this one because I was there with my boyfriend and his family and because all of the islands that we got to go to were great. We went on a cruise leaving out of San Juan, Puerto Rico and went to St. Thomas, Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, and St. Maarten. All of the islands were great and Ryan’s mom did a great job choosing which excursions we did on the islands. It was a great time and I would love to go back to some of the islands to stay for a whole week.
How I did it:
I used Window’s Live Movie Maker to make this video. I imported the pictures and videos that I wanted in the video into Movie Maker and rearranged them so that they were in chronological order. Then I decided what music to use. I went with “Under the Sea” from the Little Mermaid which you might not end up being able to hear because I have to upload the video to YouTube before I put it on here because the file is way too big and they like to mute music that is copyrighted (understandably so, it’s just annoying). Anyway I went to Project>Fit to Music so that the pictures wouldn’t take longer to go through than the music would last. I also went through and deleted some pictures that I decided I didn’t want (it also had to be under 100MB or I could not change it to MP4 on zamzar.com). I then went through and narrated some slides using captions and chose different animations for them. I also added animations to all of the pictures to make them more dynamic and less static.
Overall I am really happy with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy re-living my vacation with me!
Last week I did My Sanctuaries. I thought this one would be fun because there are a few places where I can just sit back and relax (or not relax in one case) and not worry about anything. Those places are the softball field, the mountains, the beach, the lake, the woods, and in my boyfriend’s arms. They are my favorite places in the world. These pictures basically capture what it is to be Brittany.
How I did it:
I had all of the pictures saved on my phone and I put them together in an app called PicStitch and I saved it to my phone and then uploaded it to Flickr via the app.
Here is my collage of pictures:
Daily Create #1 of this week:
I did the daily create to create a flag for my country. Oddly enough this was an assignment that I had to do in middle school. We had to create a utopia and make everything for it, a flag, a national anthem, a map. It was really fun. But no, I didn’t use that flag, I made a new one. It is simple, just a cross with a sun behind it but I like it. I just thought it up (because I love Jesus and the sun is pretty crucial to life) and drew it with markers on some paper. Here it is:
Video Assignment #2: Time Lapse Video
For my second video assignment for these two weeks I decided to do the “Activity Time Lapse” (3.5 stars). I thought it would be fun to do. I especially wish I had more time this week to do an art project and do a time lapse of that, but of course I don’t so I had to be a little more creative. I decided to do a time lapse video of me making popcorn–because who doesn’t like popcorn and also I wanted to eat some.
How I did it:
I saw that there was a time lapse function on my iPhone so I decided to try it out with this assignment. I hit start recording and grabbed my popcorn, walked upstairs and put it in the microwave and watched it pop. I watched it on my phone and thought it was a little too fast so I emailed it to myself and downloaded it. I then put it into Windows Live Movie Maker and slowed it down to half speed. That was perfect, I thought, so I exported it and went to zamzar to change it to MP4 and uploaded it to YouTube.
Here is how it turned out:
Video Assignment #3: Dear Sixteen Year Old Brittany:
For my next video assignment this week I did “Dear 16 Year Old Me” (4 stars). At first I was like eh, I don’t really know about this one. It seems interesting but I don’t know how much I would have to say. Then I realized that I actually would have a lot to say. That was the beginning of the two hardest years of school for me (college included). I was envious (I guess) of my friends because they had all the guys and no one seemed to want me except one guy that I didn’t want (funny how that works, isn’t it). Anyway I figured I would have plenty to talk about and it turns out I did.
How I did it:
I wrote the letter to myself and did no editing on it so it was exactly what I was feeling. I then opened up my webcam (CyberLink YouCam) and hit record. I pulled up the letter on Microsoft Word and read it while recording the video (which is why I’m not looking at the camera, sorry). Then I had to convert it to MP4 using Zamzar which for some reason took FOREVER to download but eventually it did. Then I uploaded it to YouTube and here it is:
Daily Create #4: Sincerely, UMW Parking Services:
I did November 14th’s daily create, “If Poets Wrote Parking Tickets.” So I think the moral of the story is that I am not a poet. My rhymes are terrible, my lines are too long, and my poem only makes a little sense but I was going for funny not realistic. So here it is:
We know there is no room
Because the construction crews are making booms
But we’re going to write this ticket
In hopes that you GET IT.
Do not park on side streets
I know you just want to get to your seats
Or get to Seaco for some eats.
But don’t do it because we will write you a ticket
And we don’t care if you picket
You still have to pay it because we don’t have money
Sorry, but that’s my job, deal with it, honey.
I just winged it–not going to lie though I used a rhyme dictionary for some of them because I’m not creative when it comes to words and when I have to rhyme I get stuck on one word and it drives me crazy. I hope you enjoy it!
Video Assignment #4: Seniority in The Wire:
This week we had to do the assignment “Video Essay” for The Wire (5 stars). Boy was it worth five stars. This assignment was a lot of work. Rather than doing a discussion of Seniority in one episode, I made mine pretty much a discussion on a theme that is throughout the show but I focused on Season 1. It would have been way too much to do it throughout the whole show. It was something that I tracked pretty thoroughly throughout season one but then focused a little less on it in season two and beyond. So anyway, I discussed the theme of seniority throughout season one of The Wire in my video essay.
How I did it:
Well at first I was getting frustrated because I couldn’t find the scenes that I wanted on YouTube. I didn’t know that you could download the episodes from the wire hub site. So once Groom told me that, I downloaded the episodes that I needed (which took a while because I was on the school wifi–bad idea). I then went through the episodes to find the scenes that I had notes on that I wanted to talk about. I got these notes from my notes on the different episodes, specifically the scenes talking about hierarchy or seniority. Once I had all of the scenes that I needed I imported the first episode into Windows Live Movie Maker and trimmed it down to the section that I needed. I used the trim tool and then the set start point and end point tools. I did this for all of the scenes that I needed.
Once I had all of my scenes, I needed to record what I wanted to say about them. I opened Audacity so I could record my speaking parts. I recorded them all. I then split my screen between Movie Maker and Audacity so I could situate my talking so it coincided with the beginning of each scene in Movie Maker. This was pretty easy. I just clicked on the beginning of the scene in Movie Maker to see what time the scene started at and I used the time shift tool in Audacity to move the words to where I needed them to be. Once I did this with all of my talking parts, I selected all and amplified them so they would be louder. I then exported it as an MP3 file and imported it into Movie Maker. I made sure everything matched up. I had to adjust the volume of the videos so that you could hear my talking over the dialogue in the scenes but so that you could still hear it when I wasn’t talking. It took a little adjusting to figure that out but it wasn’t too hard.
I then exported the video and uploaded it to YouTube. Here is the final product:
Video Assignment #5: Ay yo, Omar’s Comin’:
For my final video assignment for the week Stefanie and I did “Swede a Scene” (4.5 stars). We decided that it would be easier and more fun if we did it together. It would allow us more people to work with rather than having to do a scene where it was just one person or where we would have to take on the role of several different people (more than we had to in this one).
How we did it:
Stefanie and I brainstormed for a while on which scene we thought we should do. Stefanie had the idea to go with this one because it would be fun, and I agreed! We could make it really funny and fun and cheesy which is kind of what we tried to do. Originally one of us was going to be Omar but I managed to convince my wonderful boyfriend to take on that role instead, it took a little coaxing but I got him to agree. He also brought an awesome camera for us to use–you may not be able to tell because YouTube cut down the quality but it looked great while we were making it.
Our sets consisted of inside and outside of Stefanie’s house and outside of my house. I did much of the recording with Stefanie recording the scenes that I was in (and with my boyfriend’s help because neither Stefanie nor I had really used a camera like that to video tape with before). We had to re-do very few scenes but it still took us well over an hour to get everything recorded. I was surprised at how long it took. Stefanie and I both said we couldn’t imagine how long recording a whole episode or even a whole series would take. I know it gave me a whole new appreciation for the work that directors and actors do.
Once we had all of the scenes recorded, we went to the Convergence Center to use the Macs to do the video editing. This was upon Groom’s suggestion that I try that rather than Windows Live Movie Maker because I wasn’t happy with the amount of editing I was able to do on Movie Maker. I was extremely happy with what we were able to do using iMovie. It took a little while for us to figure out the processes (and we still haven’t quite figured it all out) but we definitely had fun figuring it out. We had to import all of the videos (which I took from the memory card and put on my thumb drive so we could have access to them in the ITCC) into iMovie. Then we had to add the scenes that we needed into the project. We moved them around and had to cut out the yelling of “GO” at the beginning of each one (haha). My favorite edit that we made was at the end where Omar (Ryan) walks into Stefanie’s house and closes the door and then we cut to the inside with him closing the door. I was super proud of that edit haha.
When we finished editing the timing of the different scenes we moved onto the sounds. It was really windy on the day that we recorded so we had to be careful what we did with the sound. We found that you could insert sound effects using iMovie that were already on the computer. So we did that for almost all of the scenes. Even the outdoor ones. Sometimes we had to cut out the sounds that were there naturally because the wind was too loud or whatever. Sometimes we even had to amplify what we were saying so you could actually hear it (and some of Ryan’s scenes you still can’t hear because he talks super low and quietly). We amplified some scenes as much as we could and it is still hard to hear but we didn’t know what else we could do. We added background music to the scene were Omar is in the store getting the cereal. We took the liberty of changing it from asking if they had Honey Nut Cheerios to asking if they had Fruity Pebbles. We thought it would be funnier. We didn’t really change any other lines. But there also weren’t really any lines in this scene. We did change the drugs from pill form to powder form (kosher salt) because none of us had a whole bunch of pills lying around (thankfully). After we were done adding the background sounds, we added a title and a credits page, as well as the bloopers at the end. Then voila, we were done.
We uploaded it to YouTube and you can find the video here:
Finally: Rawls on the Web:
For my final project I am doing Rawls. The sites I decided to make him can be found here:
Bio:
I am William Rawls, the Deputy Commissioner for Operations in the Baltimore City Police Department. I am a major a$$ and don’t care what you think about me. I try my best to make everyone hate me and make them as uncomfortable as I can. I enjoy making people’s lives miserable, annoying people to no end, going to gay bars, and hating Jimmy McNulty.
