Embarrassing confession: I spent a full five minutes crying into my keyboard while attempting to complete the Movie Scenes that Changed Our Lives assignment, all because of ONE CLIP from “A Little Princess.”

Just FYI, if you were not a little girl who grew up in the late 90′s you might not quite get what this movie does to me, but… oh man. Does it ever. In my commentary about the scenes I chose I wanted to let it play out without me babbling over the gorgeous music, so I’ll go into that later. Meanwhile, here’s me rambling about some of my most-loved film and TV moments:

I honestly wish I had more time to spend making this assignment A+ worthy. There’s so much possibility here to really tell a story, to talk about who you are as a person and how your favorite media has shaped your life, the way you think about the world, or even just the other media you see… but it’s Sunday night and it’s late and I’m tired, and frankly I’m pretty happy I found that awesome Sailor Moon clip at all. I must have spent half an hour going through every transformation sequence compilation I could find until I got to the one I wanted to use.

This was by far the easiest assignment from video week. At this point I’m quite familiar with Movie Maker, and can more or less wrestle it into doing what I want. This time around, all I had to do was find three awesome clips that I wanted to talk about (from the Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon and A Little Princess, respectively—though I can’t seem to find the Sailor Moon video I used), convert them, upload them into Movie Maker, slap some titles and then use the Narration tool to add my commentary.

I’m not particularly pleased with the quality of the narration, and I feel like this video is kind of long and rambly and boring overall, but I am pretty darn fond of the way Movie Maker automatically adjusts the sound level of clips if there’s narration going on. I feel like I would have had to wrestle with that for hours if it wasn’t built into the program.

I also wish I’d had a bit more time, or a bit more eloquence, to describe why these scenes are so important to me. It’s difficult to convey how much I lost myself in Middle Earth as a teenager, and how passionately I still love the world Tolkien created. The way Sailor Moon introduced me to a whole genre of storytelling that would bring me some of my best memories, most beloved stories, most exciting conversations and closest friendships. I actually talked about that in an earlier post from Design Week, and with a lot more coherence than I used in my video. Then there’s “A Little Princess.” This isn’t Tumblr, so it’d be out of context for me to mash my face against the keyboard and insert a few gifs to express myself, but I will say this: as a little girl who relied on her imagination to get through some terrible, terrible years in grade school, who spent a couple of years with more fictional friends than real ones, who looks up to her dad as a hero and who will never ever lose her sense of wonder at storytelling, this is probably my all-time favorite film. Not to mention the fact that the movie’s lush visuals and gorgeous cinematography influenced my sense of aesthetics for the rest of my life.

Like I mentioned earlier, I felt like this assignment had a lot of storytelling potential that I wasn’t really tapping into, and I was curious to see if students who’d completed it before me managed to do so. In the original example, Rosanna Marie does a great job of presenting high-quality clips and narration while giving us a great sense of who she is and what matters to her. She could have used more footage from “The Social Network” to make it clear why she loved the movie so much, but other than that I really enjoyed her video.

The second video I watched was from one of my classmates this semester, and the Indie Librarian really delivered with her video! By contextualizing her clips with an excellent writeup and writing her narration beforehand (NOTE TO FREAKIN’ SELF), she was able to tell a wonderful story about how she grew up in a funny, witty manner. That’s what I wish I could have done with my own video, so hats off to her!

Moral of the story: DON’T JUST RAMBLE. Good writing always always ALWAYS pays off.

One of these days that lesson is going to stick.