Made with Filmora and post it notes.

A short story of Tech taking a homeless man to a shelter during the winter months.

The Story Behind the Story

I chose the “When It’s Cold Outside” video project from the DS106 Video assignment list specifically because, rather humorously, despite being winter, it’s definitely not cold in Boulder at the moment. In fact, it’s not looking like it’s going to be for quite a while. This gave me not only the perfect opportunity to go outside and go around Boulder and do some filming while it was very pleasant (and the light was fantastic), but it also let me use humor to my advantage. I think digital stories, like any others, can sometimes really benefit from an injection of comedy, and while this particular project ended up being somewhat on the sarcastic / slapstick end of the comedy spectrum, it made it this entire project a lot of fun to produce.

(While I understand that the project specified “night” as well as “cold” and “winter,” I couldn’t get good enough light for filming at night. So, daytime it is!)

The story my particular project tells, really, is one that’s been my own the last few days: assuming it’s going to be cold outside (since it just was and it is still the middle February), only to find that it’s not only surprisingly but almost shockingly warm and pleasant outside right now—and then going out to enjoy it, even if it’s only in a simple way like pitching a camping chair and drinking soda from a cooler and wishing it was camping.

As such, the narrative becomes, in classic movie trailer form:

1. Expectation (cold outside)
2. Expectation turned on its head (it’s actually very warm outside)
3. What will happen now? (pitching a camping chair and opening a cooler, of course, but what from there?)

The idea, as with any movie trailer, is to intrigue the audience, in some way, into feeling curiosity as to what will happen next. With the humorous tone of the work, that feeling of curiosity should be shifted more onto a question of “What jokes would come next?” Particularly, ones associated with being outdoors. That open-endedness (because, of course, there isn’t a real film) is a surprising work of meta-narrative, because in this format (faux-trailer), it makes the audience “believe” there is more story to come even though they know the trailer is just a single digital story unto itself. Kinda cool!

Narrating the Process

I filmed the project using my iPad. Surprisingly, the video it shot was fairly crisp and solid (originally in 1080p). While there was no real depth-of-field or other features that a mid-tier end consumer camera might have, it did the job quite well, was portable, and was easy to upload the videos from. Which, accordingly, was exactly what I did—I uploaded the videos from my iPad to my laptop and imported them into iMovie. They were short, several second-long clips, so it went quickly and smoothly.

From there, I used some tools in iMovie to create the “movie trailer” format, arrange the videos in the fashion that I wanted, and added the text to help bridge together the story. I then exported the movie as a single 720p HD movie (to save on file size a bit), and I then uploaded it to Youtube. For the most part, it was a fairly smooth process!