Course 3 Final Project Reflection

For our final project, we had several options. I chose to edit video clips that we had taken in a previous class but hadn't had time to work with into a short video on proper microscope use that could be shown to students.

The whole process was very interesting and full of little bumps, so it was gratifying to finally achieve a product at the end.

Before we began recording, Karen, Harvey and I made a storyboard for what our video would look like. There are dozens of issues that arise every year when students begin working with microscopes, but we decided to choose only a few. It seemed a better plan to do tackle a few issues and have time to edit them effectievly rather than try to do everything and end up with nothing, especially since we originally intended to complete it in a single class.

Karen played the responsible student, I played the careless one, and Harvey was the teacher and the videographer. We tried to be a little silly so that movie would have some humor for the students - that was fun. We used one of these little video cameras (flip?) - they look like still cameras and have only a few buttons. We found out that it doesn't take still images and has a very limited zoom, so we had to zoom by actually moving forward. Also, the camera wasn't charged so it was very alarming to see the red battery light flashing every time we filmed a clip. We got the footage we had planned for and attempted to begin editing.

We tried to import the clips into MovieMaker, and it went through the process which took a few minutes, and then said "There was an error with 36 of 36 clips." We tried again, and then we tried in iMovie. Again, no luck. Finally we realized that the format of the clips (mpeg-4) is not supported by either program (in its current incarnation, anyway.) We had begun researching the fastest way to convert all of the clips when class time ran out. That's when I picked up the idea for my final project.

Luckily, I still have the old version of iMovie on my personal computer at home, which I knew supported mpeg-4. It's a lovely, comfortable program that we've used to edit many a family video. Unfortunately, the computer is now over 5 years old - it took the better part of an hour to complete the import, but hey, it worked.

The footage was limited, but it was fun trying to make it fit together. I made stills from the clips and reused some footage that was too short. I used captions rather than audio, with red for poor choices, green for good, and an orange for neutral information. I used creative commons to find background music. I searched for classical and on the first page found some piano and guitar (among my favorite instruments) that fit in well with the timing of the film. I downloaded a few audio effects, as well.

It took a few hours to get the audio and fit everything together. When I finally converted the video and posted it on youtube, I was satisfied with the product. I showed it to a few colleagues, and they think it's clear enough to show to students. We'll see!