Friday, November 20, 2009

Making the Images For Your Video

In your "How To" video you have to create images to illustrate your directions. Think about your directions and what you are going to be doing with the images. For example; if you are making an omelet you would have eggs, but you would also have an image cracking open the eggs, mixing the eggs, frying the eggs, etc. Don't forget to include all the pictures you will need.
If you can you can use the same image over again, as long as nothing about the image changes! You should have all your images drawn and cut out before Thanksgiving.
How is your film progressing so far?

Friday, November 13, 2009

Moving On to the Next Task.

Yesterday, you should have finished your newscaster video and your final copy should be turned in. I only know of two of you that actually met that deadline! This truly is not acceptable, because those of you that did not get finished were wasting so much of your time earlier. You can not waste so much time on filming or thinking "Oh, there is plenty of time," when you are not even half way done with your project. Most of you took two and a half weeks to do the first five tasks on a list of fourteen things to do. This is why you were given a checklist, so you could pace yourself!
Your next project is going to be fairly simple, but it will require planning. You are going to create a movie and then do an "audio dub" or narration of the movie. You are going to create what I call a CommonCraft movie. This is a movie that uses pictures, normally hand drawn, to illustrate ideas while the narrator explains how something works. They are fairly simple, are easy to fix with basic editting, and then you can read your script into a microphone. The timing between what you say and your images can actually be fixed by simple film cutting.
First, you must choose a subject. Think of a Science concept such as one of Newton's laws; or something from Social Studies like explaining the Battle of Gettysburg; or you can choose how to do something that you can physically do well, such as play soccer, and explain that. Take the time to look at an example from CommonCraft (I recommend the zombie or the election ones).
Keep in mind that people actually make a living doing these movies and selling them. They are quite effective at teaching something to people.
What do you think about your next assignment? What will you be planning on doing?

Friday, November 6, 2009

Finishing Newscast

By now you have finished making all the parts of your video; your background, your announcer in front of the green screen, your part that goes into the picture-within-a-picture. Hopefully, you have started putting all these together into Adobe Premiere. The Adobe Premiere program can do more things than MovieMaker can, but that makes it more complex. Since you have version 1.0 (version 8.1 is currently out at Best Buy) it can be really buggy, so save often as you work. You also need to remember to keep everything in a folder on your desktop. Once you are finished putting it together, export the movie to your desktop and do the credits and title in MovieMaker. You should have everything finished by next Thursday!!.
How are you doing in getting your video done?