Signing Words- 4 Stars

Assignment Prompt:

This assignment requires you to take a video of yourself or someone else and finger spell a word or a phrase in Sign Language alphabet and let others guess what you have spelled. Make sure you do a word that is bigger then 5 letters so you can learn some of the letters.

So I think sign language is very cool and have always wanted to learn it. I thought this might be a great way to start the process!

The Work Itself

The Story Behind the Story

I know quite a few friends that are learning sign language and I always think it’s so cool when I watch them communicate together. In fact, two of them want to become teachers for deaf children and are currently teacher assignments at a school for the deaf. Sign language is quite fascinating when you really think about. When you typically think of a language, you think of words, not movement of our hands. I am sure before sign language was invented, it must have been quite difficult for deaf people to communicate. However, with so many advances in technology, deafness could be a potential issue of the past. The technology will become more and more affordable so more people may choose to opt for hearing. Signing is a beautiful language and I wish I knew it myself.

I chose the word “magnanimous” to spell out in sign because 1) it’s a long word, 2) it is fun to spell out and 3) I like the meaning of it. The definition of  magnanimous is “very generous or forgiving, especially toward a rival or someone less powerful than oneself.” It is always important to generous as well as forgiving. So please keep that in mind when you watch my video. Please forgive my awful signing skills.

Narrating the Process

In order to make this video I first had to pick a word. I wanted to pick something a little more complicated, but a word that most people have probably heard before. So I chose the word “magnanimous,”  which I am sure you knew when you watched my signing video. Then I wanted to find a website that had individual pictures of each signing letter. Well I found a website and copied and pasted the letters I needed in the order that I needed them into a Word Document, as you can see below. I wanted this so I could have a visual on the screen as I signed, just in case I forgot which letter was which. 

Next I made the video using my webcam on the computer. Once I was happy with a recording, I proceeded to upload it to Windows Movie Maker in order to make some edits. I added music using Free Music Archive and I added a caption in order to explain my completely insane looking eyes in the video. You can see all this in the screenshots below.

After all of the editing was done, I just needed to save it as a .mp4 file then upload it to YouTube.