Where Should Alan Go On Vacation?

 Ahh..

…nothing can my true enthusiasm for being done with this assignment which involved Sending Alan on a Trip.  Sorry Alan, but this was probably the most frustrating part of DS106, for the following reasons.

1. There was no way to shorten durations of clips. While you could make it longer, mine didn’t give the chance to shorten it less than five seconds.
2. Mozilla Firefox=death. It is the slowest browser out there, and such a pain in the ass.
3. There was no ‘undo’ button, so if you erased something, you were pretty SOL.
4. Constantly.Freezing.AGH.
5. My biggest worry was that I wouldn’t be able to make it run smoothly, and unfortunately, that’s how I felt at the end: it’s not running smoothly enough.

Those are some of my complaints about using Popcorn, but I did give it a very fair try. I actually tried three times for over an hour, and I guess third time’s a charm because I finally made it through without totally giving up. Some parts still seem to be off to me but when I tried to go in and fix it, it seemed as if i made something worse so i had to settle for the lesser of two evils: have one clip be off versus the rest of the video. I used to following images/audio/video in my assignments!

^One of the Bizarre things Alan sees on his computer.

^Alan’s record.

^The Wikipedia and Google Maps Alan looks up!

^Alan’s twitter search! (Hawaii!)

^Something valuable to fund the trip!

^Unexpectedly expected!

^Where Alan will be visting! (rhymes with Dawaii  ;) )

I ended up sticking with Popcorn rather than using my usual movie editor because I didn’t want to just give up and I’d rather fail at it than not try at all. It was a true struggle. Other than the above reasons, it felt like the bane of my existence and I just wanted to choke someone before I was done. It was just extremely frustrating because while with iMovie, there are plenty of tutorials, I just felt like the Popcorn tutorial they provided wasn’t helpful at all. The idea of Popcorn and what it stands for is awesome but the execution is a disappointment. The website, or maybe the browser that it is supposedly best supported by needs some work. however, without further adieu, go here to see my Mozilla Popcorn creation!

I can honeslty say this was my least favorite thing I’ve had to do all semester because it relied entirely on an online editor that happened to break down and only work in parts the entire time I worked on it.  It was also very frustrating trying to line up all the clips in the exact spot I wanted them in because they did not lock onto each other at the ends like Mac software or audacity or anything that is convenient to use.

For this assignment, we had to remix a video following the instructions required in Mozilla Popcorn maker.  Here’s my final product.

I cannot recommend this software for anyone that has little patience or for a stress reliever before exams.  Have fun.

But Mozilla Popcorn, doesn’t taste anything like I remember.

Popcorn is supposed to be light, fluffy and easy to eat.  This was heavy, clunky, and hard to digest.    It isn’t awful, just didn’t make the process any fun.  The end result is -eh. at best.

But Mozilla Popcorn, doesn’t taste anything like I remember.

Popcorn is supposed to be light, fluffy and easy to eat.  This was heavy, clunky, and hard to digest.    It isn’t awful, just didn’t make the process any fun.  The end result is -eh. at best.

The title of this post really just scratches the surface of my feelings and emotions to the program, Mozilla Popcorn. We were given an assignment to Help Alan go on a Vacation. He created the video and left spaces between the clips for us to insert media.

(I plan on sharing all my issues with the program in this next paragraph, so feel free to skip over it, if you choose.) It too me many, MANY tries over a period of 4 nights to get this thing to work. I started off using Safari, it continually froze, played when I hit pause, wouldn’t play anything, etc. Issue, after issue, after issue. And it lead me to send this text to fellow DS106er, Brittany. And no I am NOT being dramatic! haha

Then, yesterday, Brittany suggest I download Firefox because she used that and it give her minimal issues. So I did and while I still had issues and it took me almost three hours, I FINALLY finished it. I can saw without a doubt that I’ve never been more annoyed and frustrated with anything in my life. I know the video is still not perfect, because I just couldn’t get it to be with the issues I still dealt with. But hopeful it’s okay enough.

For this assignment our professor decided that he was tried and needed a vacation to celebrate the end of the semester (how is it already the end of the semester?).  For this assignment we had to use Mozilla Popcorn Maker.  This is a web based video editor that allows you to remix audio, video, and web sources.  If you follow anyone from ds106 on twitter or happen to look at the hash tag this week, you would see a lot of frustrated students when it came to this website.  I was anything but excited to tackle this assignment since I had heard so much backlash about it.

As I started working with Popcorn, I realized that it wasn’t quite as bad as everyone was making it out to be.  The program was a bit annoying and hard to get used to but once I figured it out I didn’t have too much issue.  I did have problems with the video part getting messed up and I had to play around quite a bit with getting those fixed so they would only play the parts that I wanted it to.

But here is my final video.  Hope you like my vacation destination:

This week, I had to remix a video using Mozilla Popcorn Maker.

This is the video I was working with.

This was not my favorite assignment…

I hated the interface for the editor. There are no clear directions on how to use it at all. The drag and place function stinks because it just doesn’t do what you want it to do. You can’t rotate your media which basically makes it impossible to do anything really interactive. I was disappointed, to be honest.

Nevertheless, I got through this.

1. Harlem Shake Video

I added Harlem Shake to the video because I find it funny. No, a student didn’t create it, but it would have been funny if one did.

2. Octopie — “It’s Time”

I just liked the song. Found it on the front of SoundCloud’s rock page.

3. War of the Worlds First Edition

As a bookish nerd, I figured a very valuable item found in a end table would be a first edition book. War of the Worlds seemed funny…

4. Passport

I was deliberately being obvious. I know we’re supposed to do something unexpected but I feel like no one else is going to put a passport in there… and well you need to one to travel.

5. Video from Australia during winter

Since he was bringing sunscreen, bathing suit, etc., I thought it would be funny to send him to Australia during the middle of winter.

Overall, I really disliked the Popcorn Maker. I probably should have just gone to a video editor that I know and work well with, but I did try to challenge myself with the Mozilla editor. And boy, did I.