I once read a novel by a white reporter who is living in South Africa. It was about a fair haired little girl who was adopted by white South Africans who admired the Nazi regime. Some day they had to face that the little girl is Jewish, which caused that their behaviour turned against the girl. She from now on looked for friendship and support with the black people around.

However, this intro scene is not about this book, but about a story I have thought out myself, inspired by the book and people I know from Africa. The heroine of the story is a white girl growing up in a small village in Ghana.

You can see the hands of an adult woman starting to tell her story.

I loved the title Song Visualization for one of the ds106 video assignments, which simply is making a music video.
Still, music video is more associated with Rock, Pop and other music associated with watching cool and crazy people. I, however intended to visualize how color is mixed from 3 primary colors and this video has turned out to be really cool.

Since I have a passion for mixing colors from just three primary colors, I was delighted when I found a Sesame Street video about this, which was spring ’13 when I first tried video together with ds106. However I did not manage realizing my ideas about a music video I wanted to create from the song  in spring. I still had to learn a lot about shooting (light) and video editing. Now, more than half a year later I tried.
It was fun but not easy. The day was cloudy and I had to add light, which again made the colors too yellowish especially the blue and purple. I was able to correct this with adobe premiere elements via an effect called 3-way-color-corrector.
Look here for the effect:

A stop motion animation.

This is something many people already have done in one or another way, animating an origami crane. Then again this exactly may be the reason I also wanted to do it.

I once wrote a story about a woman who meets a Japanese man and this was about a crane, too. I’ve lost the story and now had to rewrite it to have it in a written form. However, I can tell that it was about shifting to a parallel world from watching paper cranes moved by a breath of wind to watching real cranes flying. For my stop motion animation I do not shift away, but let a paper crane fly.

The video is made out of photographs I took while folding the crane. After I’ve finished a step I put the work on a background and took an image of it. My camera was fitted on a tripod with the possibility to place it right over a table, like a reproduction stand.

For the flying crane I used a thread and let the crane appear in front of the now ‘standing’ background, where I took the images of the crane. I needed three with different positions of the wings. This was not as easy as I would have wished it, but it worked well enough.

The three images of the flying crane I combined in Photoshop to an animation and exported the frames as single images.

In Premiere Elements I loaded all my image material and put it on the timeline. I added a title and exported all as a video.

For the future I intend to learn about tweens in Photoshop, which can help me to make the motion smoother. This time I was happy to get along so well and got what I imagined for this project.

Click here for the appropriate ds106 video assignment idea.

The piece of music I found under the menu item Music of my Premiere Elements. It is called Pavane.