Hey hey hey, readers, it is Jason (as always), and in this post, I’m going to review the video projects I’ve tackled this year. Along the way, I’m also going to be answering the question: What makes a video awesome?
I’ll use each video as a way of showing an example of an important aspect of video-making, such as editing, angles, lighting, and much more.
One of the first concepts/skills we focused on was angles. We learned about how angles can help convey mood or themes, as well as different types of angles: Bird’s Eye, Close Up, and Far Angle being some of them. The project I would say best represents our knowledge of angles is the recreation video.
First, our video was revealed:
Next, we mapped out what our video would contain, such as shots, costumes, and location. We filmed ours in a little forested area by our school. Take a look.
Next, we began to work on editing and audio. We worked on finding non-copyright music, with most of us resorting to good ol’ NCS (No Copyright Sounds). That’s where most of the music for my videos comes from, with my soundtrack stuff coming from Kevin Macleod.
We also took on the task of tackling the whole microphone problem. We were given little microphones that clip onto our jackets and plug into our iPad headphone jacks. We used these for several videos, such as our Royal Tyrell Museum Artifact videos and, mort importantly, the interviews and voiceovers of our identity videos. Remember those?
The Ghost Town videos provided some problems, as well as lessons. It was one of our first encounters with storyboarding and planning. We used the story spine to plan out everything we wanted to do as soon as we got to the ghost town.
The Ghost Town Video also evoked some editing lessons from our teachers. We learned how to use filters, change speeds, and much more. Editing (in my opinion) is one of the absolute necessities for good video making, as it’s how you assemble and polish your videos. If you just lumped the videos together with no thought, than your video isn’t going to be too good,
Our final Albertan Video was the one, the only, the enchanted Forest Video. This was sort of like a culmination for all of the skills we worked on in Calgary. Acting, editing, writing, and all sorts of other skills were all put to the test for this final project. I’d like to think that Gabby, Izzy, Nik, And I were able to create a pretty good video in the limited amount of time we had to plan and film the shots and writing.
Now onto the videos we created post-Calgary, the first of which being the infamous Live Event project. This was the video project that scared me the most. Why? It involved one of my greatest weaknesses: My social life (or lack thereof). Also, it all depended on how iMovie decided to treat me, and iMovie was not nice.
Nonetheless, this project went a lot more in-depth with iMovie and provided us with even more information on editing, time and speed changes, and split screen type dealios. One of the best things about this project is all the audio skills that it taught me. I was able to figure out correct mic placement and where/how to get non-copyrighted music and sound effects, links to which are in the video I will link below.
And onto the final video of the bunch, Take thy Child to Occupation Day (Take your kid to Work Day). This was sort of like the final review of everything we learned in the past term, so yeah, this was kind of a big deal. In this project, we used everything we knew to throw together a little video about us experiencing what it’s like to be an adult in a workplace. This included interviews, shots, angles, audio, and everything along those lines. To be honest, this project was really helpful as it helped me recap everything I’ve learned and revise those skills so that I don’t forget them because, to be fair, you’re never actually done with something that you’ve learned. I may be finished with learning about videos, but I’m not done using video skills. Alas, without further ado, here’s the final product.
The video unit was incredibly helpful, as it helped me in all my subjects:
Humanities – Identity, Metaphor Machines
Science/Math – Metaphor Machines
Maker – Every other Video project
As I mentioned previously, I’m 99.75% sure that we’re not yet fully done with video-making yet, and I don’t think we ever actually will be. This unit was incredibly in depth and really helped me develop my skill set and improve my knowledge of iMovie, Clips, and many other aspects of video creation.
This is Jason, signing off.