Signing Words
Thank you goes out to my trusty assistant for allowing me to video her signing. We went online to find a sign language tutorial and put together a phrase, which is related to my host character, La Noir. The video was uploaded using Movie Maker and edited. The title was added using a transition leading into the brief sign language clip. Credits were added at the end.
For one of my first video assignments for Weeks 10 & 11, I completed Signing Words for 4.5 stars.
{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.}
I didn’t have much experience with Sign Language before making my video, however, at my church the pastor’s wife signs the entire sermon and worship songs for those in our congregation who are deaf. Because I witness this every week, I’ve always been interested in trying my hands (literally) at Sign Language, though I’ve never had the opportunity. This was a fun assignment to complete!
For this assignment, I recorded myself signing the MYSTERY word (Do you know what it is?!) and then uploaded it to Windows Live Movie Maker. From there, I customized the transitions, title page, credits, etc. I hope you enjoyed it! Also, here’s a picture of the American Sign Language Alphabet in case you would like to decode the word I spelled above. And sorry in advance to anyone who is extremely proficient in sign language, I had no idea what I was doing!
For 4.5 stars this week, I completed the Signing Words assignment, where you must spell out a word using American Sign Language. Since this was ASL related, I took out the audio, and added captions, so viewers can see what I’m signing. For this assignment, I decided to sign my host character’s full name, Sally Slaughterhouse! There were a few repeated letters, so I felt like I was signing the same thing over and over again!
In order to film this, I checked out a GoPro from the Convergence Center, so that’s why the video looks a little like a fish eye.. I used Movie Maker to add the beginning titles, transition, and captions throughout. Since I’m a PC user, using Movie Maker was much easier than trying to navigate and learn iMovie this time around.. Maybe I’ll try iMovie again with another assignment. Anyways, enjoy!
For the Signing Words assignment, we had to make a video of ourselves creating a word in sign language. This is what I made:
We’re supposed to let the viewer guess the word we make. I chose a word that’s a very important thing to do every day, every hour, every minute. Before every action even. It shouldn’t be too difficult, if you do what the signs tell you to do.
It’s something I do all the time, without anybody ever realizing or doing what it says about it. It’s a concept I think is highly relevant to life and your personal identity. This action defines everything about you, so make sure you do it for everything you do.
To make this project, I tried to get my phone at a good angle to capture my hand without my face shown. The point of observation should be the hand, so my face would have just been distracting. It was difficult to find an angle that I could twist my hand into the signs in and get a good camera image on in. Here I put my phone on a table and got on my knees. After filming it, I imported the file from my phone to my computer into Windows Movie Maker. There I added the beginning and ending cards. Since there was some background noise in the video, I decided just to mute the whole thing since sound isn’t important at all to it.
After that I just uploaded the file to YouTube.
For my second video assignment of the week, I chose to do the Signing Words assignment. It’s a four-star assignment, bringing my total for the week to eight stars. Here are the directions:
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.
I chose a word that’s relevant to my work today. See if you can figure it out.
To start off, I chose a word related to today. I didn’t want to do something completely obscure. I used my iPhone to take a short video, emailed it to myself, and then opened it in Window Movie Maker. I ran into an issue right off the bat. As you can see in the screenshot below, my video was rotated 90 degrees left of where it needed to be.
To fix this, I googled around and found this link. I’m not proud to admit this, but I actually just completely missed the button that’s even visible in the screen shot above. It ended up being very simple…Moving on!
I added two title frames, to introduce the movie and give the name of the assignment, and two credit frames, to say that I created it and name the song I used. I wanted to add some music (because a silent video like this would be weird), but I knew the video was short, so I needed something that got to the point quickly. I decided to use “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes. It has a catchy tune right out of the gate and most people know it. Windows Movie Maker automatically cut the song to the length of the video, so I didn’t have to worry about that, but I did add a fade out to help the ending not be so abrupt.
Here’s what my project looked like at the end.
This 4 star assignment required us to take a video of ourselves finger spelling a word that was bigger than 5 letters. I chose a short phrase that shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
My thinking behind the assignment was that I’ve never done anything that involved using ASL so it would be interesting to learn something simple. To make the opening and closing sequences, I used windows Movie Maker. I didn’t do any special editing to the video other than adding the opening and credits.
I signed the word I think I have said the most in the past couple of days.
This is a video assignment and its worth 4 stars. For this assignment we had to create a word that was a least four letters using only sign language. I had decided on more than one word and once you figure it I hope you can comment your idea of what you think it might be. This also connects with a certain task that we had to do this week and that is the only hint I will give you. It took me a few tries to record because it is actually nerve wracking putting it together and getting your hands the way you want to in the camera so that was a little but of a challenge but I did it! I hope you figure it out. Good Luck!
For this video assignment I had to spell out a word or phrase in American Sign Language so the viewers can guess it. I decided to relate it to our class by spelling out the name of a character from American Horror Story: Asylum since that is what my blog is based off of. Good luck guessing the character’s name.
I will give you guys one hint as to who the character is: he is a doctor who works at the Briarcliff Insane Asylum. This video was fun to make because I got to brush up on my sign language alphabet while also learning how to sign “hello, my name is…”, “goodbye”, and “doctor”. If you haven’t guessed the character’s name yet you are out of time, it’s Doctor Oliver Thredson. He was the man who was Bloody Face but he let Kit Walker take the fall for his serial killings.
For the Signing Words assignment (4 stars), we had to fingerspell a word that was long enough for the viewers to guess. I was really excited to see this assignment. I took two years of ASL when I was in high school, and I absolutely loved it. The language is so fascinating linguistically, and the usefulness of it for people who are Deaf/HOH or mute is something I find absolutely wonderful.
Unfortunately, UMW doesn’t offer an ASL course, and so I haven’t been studying it or keeping up with learning for the past 4 years. So one of the most difficult things about this video was relearning words and grammar (and I’m almost positive I got some things wrong). Sure, I could have just not done that, but I felt like it was important. Mostly because it allowed me to get back into studying it. Or at least using ASLU’s wonderful dictionary. Also it increased the challenge for me, since I already know the sign language alphabet pretty well (even if i’m clumsy at signing it)
Process:
So, I filmed it using my webcam, and then imported it into Windows Movie Maker
To add the captions, I clicked the “Caption” button (as seen in the first image), and these are the options I chose for it. The text is white with a narrow outline in black, and I played around with the Text Duration section so they fit where I want.
So this is what my captions look like
Then I imported the music in. I used some that I had previously downloaded for the radio show, from Incompetech.
I messed with the music volume so it wasn’t too loud (although there’s no other sound going on in the video), and also allowed it to fade out at the end
For the title and credit sequence, I just used those two, and chose from the various themes until I found one I liked.
Then I saved the video and uploaded it to YouTube!
