This is my documentary for the week. You can find the assignment at http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/mini-documentary/. While this was fun to make since I spent some extra time with Nate, It was challenging due to my lack of resources and some other things going on in my life this week. I hope you like it.
For 4.5 stars this week, I completed the Mini Documentary assignment, and used it as a way to get a better glimpse into the life of my host character, Sally Slaughterhouse. It kind of acts like a trailer for a longer film, if I were to actually create an entire film about Sally.
To create this short film, I recorded Sally speaking, and also took some photos around campus that would look like no one was around. It was difficult to get shots where there were no people, but I eventually did it! I then used Movie Maker to put the photos and videos together. I added some transitions, beginning and end titles, and some panning action on the still frames. I also used a website called incompetech.com to find some royalty free music to add to the background. The music I used is called “Wounded” by Kevin MacLeod.
Overall, I think this is a decent piece of work for me, considering that I started completely from scratch! The audio quality could have been a little bit clearer, but unless you are using lapel mics or any other mic, you will end up with some white noise in thrown in there as well. After a while, hearing the same music over and over again as I was editing got kind of annoying, but I thought it added a great emotion to my documentary! Enjoy!
This week we had to do a biography of someone not obviously close to us. I decided to do it on Dan Hubbard who is a business professor at UMW. I’m currently in his Perspectives on Human Organization in Society class and am always interested in what he has to say so he seemed an obvious choice, especially since he is so approachable. I used Vegas Movie Studio to put this video together. I used AVS audio editor to take out the noise in the background of the audio and make it louder.
The only thing I am upset about is that I was very unfamiliar with shooting movies from my phone and thus made the fatal error of recording non-horizontally and therefore making it extremely obvious that a cellphone was used. -_- Oh well, you live and you learn.
Who is Morlium? This video gives all that we can share about him.
Putting together the video was an arduous task. I first had to outline how the documentary would transition, then find clips and pictures appropriate to the narrative arc. I was able to extract general clips from youtube videos using clipconverter. I found the clips and pictures, but had to split them into enough pieces using Windows Movie Maker to give some change to the scene. Once I had a workable video, I again recorded a voice overlay on audacity while watching the movie. I stripped the sound out of the nature clips and reduced the volume of the static clips using the Video Volume option in Windows Movie-maker.
All in all, this is admittedly a rush job. I was unable to find some clips that I wanted, such as a first person view of running through the woods or some computer-modeling animation, both of course devoid of context-specific details. As a result, I had to make due with what I could find in the time available.
One of the assignment we have to do which was worth 0 star is to create a mini documentary. Because the professor suggest that we can link it to our host character I decide to conduct an interview with my host character. The lack of people to helps me made be do something pretty interesting, I used the OBS broadcasting software which I choose to share a twitter conversation (which it was me asking my host character question) and the other screen was the video camera of my laptop. I decided to do this because I did not have anyone else to help me to do this documentary and because I think it is similar as a webinars that are going around lately. I remember I had something similar for my anthropology class last semester. I uploaded the video to youtube where by my surprise I notice I can add slide with letter either at the end or the beginning of the video which I did and as always I choose the music that youtube provide for the videoclips.
This week I got a short interview with Dennis where we could quickly talk about his life motto. Dennis was nice enough to record himself however, he was quite vague. It must just be his thing. Here is the interview video enjoy!
This is a 4.5 star video assignment done for Ds106 titled Mini Documentary. It was done by recording “Dennis” and then editing the video along with some pictures and a song together in iMovie. You can see a behind the scenes picture of editing here.
For this video assignment I had to a mini documentary on someone. I decided to focus on Dr. Oliver Thredson from American Horror Story because he is such a dynamic character. I decided to focus the beginning of the video on the kind man who is portrayed through most of the season. However, the end of the video focuses on the mad man who calls himself Bloody Face.
I really enjoyed doing this assignment and am glad that my 8 hours of work on it turned out amazing. I only used audio and video clips from the show and organized them how I wanted them. I realized halfway through this assignment that it would have been easier to just talk about the character but I knew I could manipulate the audio clips I chose to send the message and decided to keep going. I ended up using both Windows Movie Maker and Audacity for this assignment and really like how it turned out.
For this assignment I used movie maker to record my video. I then found the above pictures off of google to incorporate into my video. I searched on YouTube for a short sound clip and I liked the one that I attached in the video. After I was complete I uploaded the video to WordPress!
This documentary is about Gary Close, a long-time friend and neighbor. Gary is a man of many talents and interests. He’s an artist, author, devoted husband and father. Gary is civic minded and a former Commonwealth’s Attorney. With a passion for history and preservation, Gary has restored old homes. This video was filmed at Gary’s home in Culpeper. I took photographs as well as video. That was the easy part. The editing took about 4-5 hours using Movie Maker. Once the videos and stills were uploaded, I had to review each segment and decide which to use. The first cut was about 7 minutes long. That’s where the real editing started. After splitting and trimming, and splitting and trimming, and changing the speed of video as well as some audio, I was finally able to condense the documentary into 3 minutes. This 4 star assignment deserves all of 5 stars. Unfortunately, there were some problems with the audio that were not able to be corrected because of having limited use of equipment.
This is a Video Assignment worth 4 stars. This assignment had the opportunity to follow someone and to highlight their life. I put a twist to my documentary and used my host character The Death Whisperer as the main character to follow. The challenge of this is that she is no where to be scene. I liked having the idea that I was searching for the unknown and it was kind of a mystery factor added to it. I also added sounds from freesound.org to add to the haunting of my host character. I had tried to go around the city to parks and cemetery but unfortunately they were closed so that would be one way of improving this assignment. I added my voice in to talk about my reason of the documentary and how by trying to “follow” her it was also bringing the fear of her following me. I also made the video black and white to add more to the haunting factor. I hope you enjoy it! I know that in the description of the assignment it talked about the quality but to give you a better reason of using my phone was to make it as if it was a ghost hunt in a sense!
