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This video is what my spy, Margaret de la Tour wish she knew when she was 16! To make this video, I pieced together clips using iMovie. I used time lapse mostly for the whole thing. I incorporated various angles and such to make it more interesting than if I just had it one angle the whole time. I also used a voice over to read the letter. This was the first time I did a voice over and it was really cool and I liked the touch it gave the video.
For my last assignment, I did “Dear Sixteen Year Old, Me” for 4 stars. It was 4 1/2, I rated it a 3, and it dropped a half star. For me, the hardest part was the thinking. What did my 16yo self need to know? Definitely that life gets better after high school. And rugby is great. I definitely did not expect the video to be 12+ minutes long. I just have that much good advice, guys. Wow, four years is both really long and really short. I felt kinda old after I finished; I know I’ve changed a ton since I was 16 (thank God). At the same time, it really wasn’t all that long ago.
I used the CyberLink YouCam 6 once again, and uploaded directly to YouTube.
Have you ever thought about what you would do differently in life if you had the chance to go back? I know I have… I luckily came across this video assignment which allowed me the opportunity to do just that. The assignment required that I do a video letter to my sixteen year old self talking about anything that I would’ve wanted the sixteen year old me to know. I thought giving advice to the teenage me wold be easy, turns out it wasn’t. I spent more time just thinking about what I would say than I did actually recording it. Since this is going up on the internet I didn’t want to get too personal…anyhow here’s the best I could come up with.
You can follow these steps to make a video letter to your sixteen year old self.
This DS106 Video Assignment didn’t take too much time to record, but it did take a while to think about what I was going to say. Most of it is light, but I do talk a bit serious for a couple of moments. Recorded this with my iMac webcam, cut together in iMovie and even put in a Fine Young Cannibals tune from 1988. Not sure if the music was a nice compliment or a bit of a distraction. Comments appreciated.
Hey guys!
Video making magic for weeks 11&12
The Assignment
This assignment is called “Dear Sixteen Year-Old Me” and it is worth 4.5 stars. The exact instructions are: “This could really be a video or audio. But write a letter to your 16 year old self. Talk about anything you want. (I.E: Don’t cut your hair, you will look crazy. Or, don’t stress out about college, you will get it!) Just talk about things that you wish the 16 year old version of you knew back then.”
The Story
Overall, I really like the 16 year-old me. As a matter of fact, I have pretty much liked myself my whole life. I loved and still love my personality. The things that I needed to work on were self-confidence and assertion. I grew up a major people pleaser and I always got very anxious about everything. I was just a nervous little ball of energy. Looking back, I feel bad that I spent so much energy worrying about things because it wasn’t healthy and I’m glad I have learned to tame it. I was also an “overachiever” and I worked hard to get A’s and was very disappointed when I did not. I also berated myself for making stupid mistakes. All of these things got much better with age and I can’t say that my teen years were really that hard. I didn’t really do crazy drugs or sneak out of the house at night or drink withe my friends. I think it was because I was afraid of my dad and knew he would make my life miserable if he ever found me misbehaving. The biggest thing I could ever tell any young person is that they need to be confident, confident, CONFIDENT. Mistakes will happen and THAT’S OKAY. I would also like to say that having a sense of pride is also very important. I am sad that I lacked those things at 16 but it was a life lived and lesson learned. Looking back, I don’t have any regrets at 16. I felt kind of chubby and awkward but it could have been much worse.
The Product
The Process
I wanted to add a bit of a twist to this so I did a screen recording using OBS which is a great live streaming program. It allows you to really customize your screen and recordings. I added my FaceTime camera and it began capturing me AND what I was doing on the screen. I thought it would be really helpful to actually look at pictures of myself around 16 years old while I am talking and reacting. I am very happy with how it turned out because I would see a picture and it would remind me of something I want to say. The whole process did not take long. I just hit “start recording” on OBS and then began talking. The videos automatically save to my desktop when I end my recording.
This is a Video Assignment and it is worth 4 Stars. This assignment gave me the task of creating a letter for myself if I was given the opportunity. I started out by actually typing up the letter and reflecting on my life. It actually took longer than I thought to actually write the letter because where can one even begin to write to your younger self about life and how to get through the final years of high school. I just took a deep breath and typed what I would feel would be the most efficient advice. Once I finished writing the letter I went to YouTube and recorded myself reading the letter from there since I thought that it would be more authentic. If there was anything I could do to improve on this assignment it would have to be actually putting parts of my letter and adding it in text to the video as I’m reading it as if the words are flowing all around me. I know it would be a lot of software learning for me to do but I believe that would really make my letter come to life.
Being 16 is not always easy. For me it was the time when I wanted to grow up so fast and be done with high school but looking back there are definitely some things I wish I knew then that I’ve learned over the years.
This assignment required me to write a letter to my 16 year old self talking about things I wish I knew then. In my video I gave advice to my younger self .
To record the video I used the camera on my laptop. I then opened the file in Movie Maker to trim the beginning of the video 
I also added music to the video and used the music editing tools to fit it to the parts of the video where I wanted it.
The final step was to edit the opening and closing sequences and that was the end of this assignment.
Sorry for the rather crude title, but I didn’t mention much in the video how much I actually hate 16 year old me. Seriously, she was actually the worst. She probably would have believed in reverse racism. The. Worst.
But, I still talked to her today in this video.
For the Dear 16 Year Old Me assignment (4 stars), we had to talk to our 16 year old self and give them some advice for the coming future and all the terrible decisions they’re about to make. Coincidentally, I believe 16 was the age when I really started to start figuring myself out (I hadn’t figured myself out yet, but I was almost at the beginning point, so….y’know). I found out about asexuality and social anxiety and found that they both fit me. I had my first really bad anxiety attack. I stopped crushing on a boy I had been crushing on for all of high school. I had the worst English teacher in all my years of learning.
But I wanted to warn myself more about the then-distant future. The beginning of college. The point in time where things actually started going to shit, and I slowly turned into an empty husk of a human being who doesn’t believe in reality and feels as though their entire existence is useless. I was having a bad week when I made this video, I think…or just a bad day. At this point, who knows.
But it’s cathartic to be able to talk to your younger self and tell them things about their future. Like I said, I hope there’s a future me right now telling me that things will get better.
Process:
Same as in the Fingerspelling assignment, but now I’ll explain the little cuts I made.
Initially, I filmed it so that it would be cut, cutting myself off, allowing for adequate time to make the cut, and then readjusting my position and face to act accordingly.
Then I put everything into Windows Movie Maker, and moved the slider to the point in time when the cut would occur.
Then I used the split tool to separate the video at that point in time, and then used the trim tool to cut out any excess at the beginning and end of these little separate parts, to make it look nicer.