Welcome to my recap of the Vibrant Video project. In this project we developed our video making skills. We looked at four different skills, and made four different short films to represent these films. This post will be shorter than usual, but I hope it temporarily scratches your blog post itch.

To start off we learned about editing. We did this by using an app called Clips. This app is that is a little hard to explain here, but you can watch a YouTube video explaining it here.

For the first assignment, or skill #1, we were told to ‘Think Like a Movie Maker’. Each skill that we got had a goal behind it. This skills goal was to put multiple clips together to tell a simple story with a musical soundtrack to create mood. We did this by showcasing a hobby or interest. We were also given a list of criteria to follow. This included things like panning across a photo, using a filter, add background music, use titles, and so on and so forth. You can watch my video here.

I found some small thing that I didn’t like in clips as opposed to iMovie, which I did most of my editing in. Although clips is more intuitive, there are some things that you can’t do, or I haven’t figured out how to do and I think that it takes away from the final product. Some of the things that I found include the following. You cannot change the music halfway through a project, you cannot remove the music for a small portion of the project, and you can not record audio after recording the clips. It was small things like this that bothered me, and the same goes for the tools we used for skill #3. But first, skill #2. 

In skill #2, ‘Framing Shots and Developing Angles’, the goal was to create a silent film. To get in the mindset of this style of film, we looked at some movie history. This included things like the first ever movie, peoples reactions to the first movie, and other things like that. After learning about these things, we started creating our silent films outside of school. I got my friends Dana and Brooke to act in my film so that I could set up the angles to practice skill #2. This was the result of my silent film.

Skill #3 was ‘Planning and Shooting’, and the goal was to create a tutorial video with a small group. The people in my group were Max, Teva, and Cale. We made a how to video on how to drink water. We were using a feature in the new iMovie update called storyboard. This feature gave you a layout for the type of video that you wanted to make. It then gave you a layout to follow. The layout we used looked like this.

In the chaos of filming, we didn’t follow this template exactly, and it showed. Most videos are either saved by the editing or ruined by it, and this one was definitely ruined. We had a lot of good raw footage, but once we tried to put it into the storyboard template, it all fell apart. Since we didn’t follow the template exactly, there were writing where we didn’t want it and other things that the storyboard template forced. This is why I didn’t like using the storyboard feature as much as the basic movie. With the basic movie, there is a lot more malleability and manipulatability. With both the storyboard template and clips, there was a lack of options that lead to the reduction of changing while filming, which is one of my favourite parts of filming. Whenever your filming something, you can have a rough idea in your head and then change it while your filming to stay with the flow. But with the storyboard, you just couldn’t do that. As a result, the end video looked something like this.

Next was skill #4. This was probably my favourite video to make. This one was also did in a small group. The people in my group were Declan, and Alfie. Skill #4 was ‘Making the Most of Effects’, and the goal was to create a special effects sequence with a small group. We started out by looking at the history of special effects throughout movies. We the looked at some special effects that we could create ourselves using iMovie. These included transitions like cuts, fades, and dissolves, to more complex things like green screen, Picture in Picture, and cut-aways. We also looked at some filming techniques like shot reverse shot, eye line match, and more. In addition to that, we were taught how to use an app called action movie. We then used all of our knowledge to create our film. After doing a little bit of planning, we got to filming. The end result looked a little something like this.

There were some more fantastic examples that were created by our class, including one made by Fraser, Theryn, and Nolan. You can read Fraser’s blogpost on this project here, and you can watch their video here.

With the conclusion of this skill, came the conclusion of this project. This project was a lot of fun, and it was one of my favourite that we’ve done. The one thing I didn’t like about it was the restrictiveness of the tools and applications that we used, but besides that one nit picky thing, this was a great project. I think that I can take all of the things that I have learned from making videos in this project and apply them to any videos I male in the future. I am very excited to work with videos and other things like that in the future, and I can’t wait for the next project where we do so.

thank you for taking the time to read my blog, and have a great day.