Spring Cleaning: Sprucing up the Portfolio!

Students will add their video creations to their personal websites/digital portfolios - along with samples of work from graphic design, 2D art, photography, VR photography, interactive images, QR codes, etc.

Students will use the web-building tools to organize the materials to make them easily accessible for site visitors - AND - will attach a RATIONALE for each sample in the portfolio.

Rationale

Each example will be accompanied by a written explanation of the sample, a description of the production process, and a discussion of all considerations that went into the design. The rationale is the opportunity for the student to explain their learning to their social media audiences, which may include faculty, family, colleagues and potential employers.

 

Updated websites will be reviewed in class on Thursday before Spring Break.

Making your own Music Video!

 Students will hone their editing chops by producing a "music video" using song lyrics and "freegal" video & photo resources. This will help develop a simple planning process for editing (which can be transferred to shooting video, too.)

1. Students will select a song to make into a video, and will script out the lyrics (with time codes) in a table to create a "shot list."
2. Students will complete the table with a description of what images they want for each lyrical segment, making a "shopping list" for video footage and photos, etc.
3. Students will begin "shopping" for "freegal" visual collateral, saving all assets in a folder dedicated to the project.
4. Along the way, students should keep records of the assets which require attribution, (e.g. CC BY licenses.)
5. Students will revise their shot list based on the images they actually chose to use, making the list into a Video Editing Guide - which will guide their editing in the lab.
6. Students should refresh their knowledge of copyright laws and Fair Use guidelines to discuss how such materials may or may not be used.

Below is an example of a couple minutes of a music video of Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I am a Town"  using CC 0 (Public Domain) image resources from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons, and video footage licensed through VideoBlocks, and a few CC BY images from VisualHunt (which will be acknowledge in the credits of the finished video.)

The Shot List / Editing List looks like this:

Some Audio and Video Resources

 Try these Resources for Audio assets:

• Dr. Nick's Pinterest Board for  "legal" Audio
• Jamendo - lots of music, various CC licenses
• FreePlay Music - free personal and student educational use
• PD Sounds - free sound fx

Try these Resources for Video assets:

• www.nps.gov/media/multimedia-search.htmU.S. Copyright Statement on Fair Use
• Dr. Nichols' Pinterest Board for "legal" video
• Archive.org public domain film, movie and video footage
• WikiMedia Videos - CC & Public domain
• US National Parks B-roll

Editing Video!!!

 

Students will use Premiere Pro (and provided video, audio and photos) to recreate the 25-second introduction to a fictitious documentary called "Baseball: America's Pasttime."

 In doing so, students will demonstrate their learning of the program interface, importing collateral, using photos, layers, timeline, transitions, effects, editing clips before and after insertion to the timeline, titling, the Ken Burns effect, and exporting to various video formats (in this case, a format suitable for YouTube.)

They will upload their videos to YouTube and embed them in their blogs with additional prose commentary on the process.

In the folder I shared you will find a sample - also available here: 

Some of the tasks I completed while making this clip:

• cutting a video clip into two segments
• dropping in a music clip for background
• shortening a music clip
• "fading out" a music clip
• adding title
• adding photos and resizing photos for frame
• fading in - and out - title
• fading in photos
• cross-fading between photos
• "Ken Burns" Effect - rough cut - on still photos
• fading video to black
• and more...

A good YouTube tutorial of the "Ken Burns Effect"
 

Adobe has some helpful links to instructions and video tutorials to help you get started HERE.
(In follow-up projects, students will create a sample of camera shots, and a brief tutorial on tips to make video better.)

RESOURCES:

Is Google (Still) Making Us Stupid?

 Let me provoke some of your thinking with an article that is now a "classic,: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
As you read the article, think about these questions to provoke insightful comments in your next blog.

1.  How does the author describe changes in his attention span?
2. Do you relate to the experiences of Scott Karp or Bruce Friedman? How so?
3. How did the typewriter affect the writings of Nietzsche? Can you describe how specific technologies have altered your reading, writing, thinking in similar ways?
4. Authors Lewis Mumford and Joseph Weizenbaum both discuss a piece of technology that changed human life in incredible ways. What device was it? 
5. How has the Net changed other media, like TV, newspapers, etc.?
6. What do you think of Taylor's "system" and philosophy? Based on the info in the article, what do you think it would be like to work at Google?
7.  What was Socrates' fear about the invention of writing? Can you apply that concern to other technologies?
8. What does Richard Foreman see as the difference between the ideal human of his time and the ideal human of the digital age? Do you agree with him? What are the implications of such changes?
   

IF THIS ARTICLE WERE WRITTEN TODAY, (instead of in ancient times of 2008) - WHAT WORD WOULD YOU PUT IN PLACE OF "Google" IN THE TITLE?  Which technology, social media platform, device, program, etc. would you write about? Explain why you made this choice.

Shooting a "Video Vocabulary" - Part 1

  PART 1:

Students will be "shooting the vocabulary" - that is to say, shooting original video illustrating a number of shots used in video production, namely - these shots:

• The extreme wide shot
• The wide, also known as a long shot
• The full shot
• The medium shot
• The medium close-up shot
• The close-up shot
• The extreme close-up shot
• The establishing shot

SEE THIS SET OF EXAMPLES!

Students will also add samples of the four basic camera movements: Pan, Tilt, Zoom, and Dolly/Truck.  (See Pan, Tilt, Dolly, Zooming)

Students will keep these video clips in a dedicated folder for editing. (The folder should be named something like, "Video Vocabulary" or Vocabulary of Video Shots.")