You see that video at the top of the post, pretty good right? Looks almost professional, so how could a group of grade 9 students with iPads make it looks so good? The answer is that we can’t but that was what we were trying to do with our first major project for maker. If you don’t know, this year for PLP we are focusing on video making skills. This project was solely based around these skills, I mean this is our driving question: What Technologies, tools, and strategies can we utilize to create short films? To help us answer the driving question we had to make a carbon copy of Run! which is the video at the top of this post. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a carbon copy is, I didn’t either before this project. A carbon copy basically means that everything is exactly the same right down to the tiniest detail, because of that it made this project 1000x harder. However before we could even think about how we were going to get every aspect of this film the same there were somethings we had to do first.
Have you ever heard of the Myers-Briggs test? It’s a test that claims that everyone can be separated into 16 different personality types, every four personality split into a larger group that gives a bigger overview of the personalities in that group. I recommend that you go check it out it’s very cool. I was given the personality type ISTP also known as the Virtuoso which is part of the Explorers group. Surprisingly the results were fairly accurate based on how the pages written on my personality described how I acted and felt but there was only one part of this milestone that directly affected our project and that was the page on our strengths and weaknesses. Using this knowledge that I had gained about how my mind supposedly worked I used this knowledge to try and strengthen our group dynamic. Since I get easily bored I tried to take on tasks that weren’t as repetitive which would lead me to losing interest and doing something else. I’m also apparently very good in a crisis situation so when our group started to fall apart under pressure I was the one who helped us get back on track.
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Next we had to make a screenplay which is basically an instruction manual to how to shoot the film. It has all the different shots needed to tell the story in order with dialogue and directions underneath each shot description. I took on the role of writing the screenplay which I believe turned out pretty well. Although there was a in class demonstration on how to write screenplays in pages I had actually wanted to use another software called celtx which is an app that has all the different parts of a screenplay already embedded into the app and all you have to do is tap on whichever one you are using at the time. This would have definitely helped use create a much more organized screenplay if it wasn’t for the fact that you are unable to share and collaborate on celtx which defeated the purpose of a group project where everyone is supposed to contribute ideas and knowledge to the product. We decided to use pages instead. I believe that I was able to show my use of the ISTE standard Computational Thinker by finding different softwares that all achieve the same task and seeing which one works the best for what we are trying to do.
Once we had done our screenplay we moved on to making a storyboard. A storyboard is a visual representation of the screenplay and is used as a quick reference for what I happening in the screen so directors don’t have to keep referring to the screenplay and using valuable time to read and comprehend what’s happening. Although I wasn’t the main person doing the storyboard, that was Rhiann, I still helped with the animations and timing. We used keynote for our storyboard because it allowed use to do more than just have drawings showing what’s happening. We are able to animate the drawings or shapes of people so it shows a little more about what is happening in this scene.
You may think that we would be able to film now but there is still one more step before we get there, that step is creating a call sheet. A call sheet is what is used by cast and crew alike to know who and what is needed for each shot. This time Ryan was in charge but as always both Rhiann and I had to contribute to this milestone simply because we were figuring when we were all free to film. We of course used Pages again since a call sheet template had been given to us to make this milestone easier. So far in this project we hadn’t faced any major problems but that changed when it came to this call sheet. You see all three of our group members had very different and conflicting schedules and although some of us were willing to miss events for this project others either didn’t want to or just couldn’t. This lead to some strange shooting days.
Finally it was time to actually film our video, as I mentioned before everyone’s schedules conflicted with each other’s so it was very hard to find a date that worked for all three of us so we decided that since both Ryan and I were free on the same day we would go shoot the bulk of what we could and the shoot the rest during maker with Rhiann. This worked for the most part but without the third person there we didn’t have a second opinion on my directions which lead to some major mistakes when it came to making a carbon copy. You can see that first draft up above, you can compare it to the original and see how many differences you can find.
For our second draft we knew better than to have only two out of the three group members while filming so we filmed almost all our scenes during a maker block except for the two that we needed a black hoodie for, we filmed those on the weekend. Once the footage had been shot it was time to edit, I used iMovie since it is really easy to use while still giving really good results, but I mainly use Photos itself to edit the individual shots because it has way more options than iMovie like changing the black point or brightness of the video. However while editing this video I realized that I needed audio to create a spooky affect when the Demon/Lunatic was on screen and since I couldn’t get sound off of YouTube I made my own in GarageBand. Obviously I am no master at making music so I decided to look for a tutorial on how to make creepy music in GarageBand and I found a great one on YouTube. I watched the video and altered changed some of the steps so the sound was a little more my own than just a copy of the example in the video. Once I put it together in iMovie I uploaded it to YouTube and here I am. I feel like I showed amazing use of the ISTE standard Innovative Thinker by using these different programs to help solve some problem I had had with the footage or sound so that the final product is better.
In the end I feel like have learned a lot of things from this project, like my strengths and weaknesses and how different softwares are better for different things. However to answer the driving question I believe there are so many different things we can use to create films it would take forever but here are the most important things to remember in my opinion: Play to your strengths, both iMovie and GarageBand are great programs to do your work on, use templates so things take less time in general. Finally I’d like to talk about the last ISTE standard, Knowledge Constructor, I feel like I have demonstrated my use of this standard throughout the project by using many different tools to get us to the final product and used these tools to help teach my self many different things about film making.