Funnily enough, this whole thing came about because I was attempting to do the Make it Constanza Decent assignment in which you film a day in your life, and my footage ended up being kind of crappy. I was happy with some of it, though, and wanted to use it for something in video week, so I figured I might as well make up an assignment to suit the resources I had. 4Life, right? 
You can check out this brand-spanking-new 3-star assignment in the Assignment Bank.
Here’s the final version of my project, a favorite poem set to music and original video:
In creating this assignment, I was heavily inspired by the collection “Words for You,” a CD compilation of famous poems read by equally famous actors and set to appropriate music. My favorite of the entire collection is the inimitable (and weirdly attractive) Benedict Cumberbatch reading Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”
I’ve listened to it countless times, and as with each poem in the collection, I’m always impressed by how well the music fits the narration, the tempo and the tone of the poem.
As someone who would probably dissolve into nothing but poems if given the option, I couldn’t help but think of Millay’s beautiful and haunting poem “Travel” while I was heading home on the train. In point of fact, that particular piece is rarely out of my thoughts; for most of my four years at UMW, I’ve lived in a dorm or apartment where I can hear the train whistles she describes.
To create this video, I first shot some footage at the Fredericksburg train station and on the train itself with my digital camera. Next I uploaded it into Windows Movie Maker and edited down the excess video I’d shot into only the best few clips, adding gradual transitions between each one to compliment the overall feel I wanted for the video. After that I visited the wonderful Incompetech.com to find background music that would suit the poem, and ended up settling on a piece called Winter Chimes. After some serious editing in Audacity to make the song fit the video in terms of length (including altering the speed and pitch of the song), I recorded myself reading Millay’s poem with my handheld digital recorder. After uploading and converting the audio using Online-Convert.com, I imported it into Audacity and started fitting it to my music. This proved to be the most hardest part of the process for me—I’m an avowed perfectionist, and making sure the narration matched up at least somewhat rhythmically to the music turned out to be much more difficult than I’d anticipated. Next time I’ll probably just record myself reading whatever text I want to give a musical background while listening to the music, so I can keep it to tempo naturally.
Once I had my background music and narration complete, all I had to do was slap it onto the video, upload it to YouTube and hustle my butt over here to do the writeup! Awesome.
I think this assignment could be a useful one for a number of reasons. First of all, I’d hope that students attempting it would give real thought to how they are creating a mood through the combination of video, music, the content of their text and the tone of their narration. Second, getting the final video to both sound good and look good are dependent upon a student’s ability to do at least basic video and audio editing—you can’t just read something and chuck it in with a couple clips of a running puppy and a Yanni song and expect it to be meaningful. There’s got to be some thought as to when the music starts and stops, when the narration cuts in and out, and what visual elements are playing at the same time. Third, a requirement of the assignment as I’m going to write it is for students to shoot their own original video, which will require them to think about composition, lighting, setting, and the kind of tools they’re using to film. Overall, they should be trying to create a video that tells a story, or at least enhances the story being told by the text they’ve chosen to read.
Huh. Maybe this ought to be a 4-star assignment after all?
