I learned about camera angles and what they might mean. Things like zooming in/out, over the shoulder shots, low/high angles, etc., all have different meanings. Each one tells a story to the viewer even if the viewer isn’t quite aware of it. The newest concept for me was the rule of thirds. I’ve heard of this before in photography but had no idea that it pertained to movies as well.
Check out this article on the rule of thirds to learn more.
The video assignments in the assignment bank were all pretty difficult and time consuming. I wasn’t excited to do any of them. Editing is fairly easy. It’s just slow. Sometimes it took a lot of processing power. My poor laptop was running hot for some time while I completed these assignments.
The Every Hour Vlog I did took nearly an hour to process. I didn’t even add sound or effects to it due to the long process time. With more time and a better computer, I would have liked to add sound to it.
What was easier?
The easiest part was editing videos. I like editing videos. I just don’t like creating them.
What drove you crazy? Why?
Recording my life drove me crazy. I want to be a content creator, but I don’t necessarily want to be on the screen. I would like to be behind the camera, maybe narrating or something. The Every Hour Vlog was really not fun. I kept forgetting to record. And when I did remember, my schedule didn’t allow for stopping a recording. Plus, I spend 1/4 of my day driving, so the driving clips are longer than everything else.
I enjoyed analyzing movie clips according to Ebert’s theories. I found this quite fun, actually. In the future, I might just do this while watching tv shows and such to see what I can learn. I don’t think I gain any new information from doing this, but I do understand why I am getting certain thoughts about whatever I’m watching. I’m definitely being influenced by camera angles, lighting, dialogue, sound effects, etc.
In case you missed it, here is the video where I tried my hand at reading a video clip from American Psycho.
Prompt: For one day, take a short video during every hour you’re awake, and then string the clips together to create a montage. The goal is to make a complete video that gives the person watching a full picture of your day. Experiment with video production and be creative! Try out different transitions, visuals, etc.
This assignment is based off of Jordan Taylor’s videos—check them out if you need some inspiration! (Note: in each Every Hour Vlog, Jordan filmed every hour on the hour. You don’t need to be quite as strict as that, but make sure you get at least one clip every hour.)
As a fairly private person, it was a challenge to do this assignment. It was especially difficult since I spend the majority of my time on the road. Eventually, I just let the camera roll because it was too dangerous to try to control the camera while driving. My days are fairly boring because of the whole driving thing.
On Sundays, my family goes to church. You can check out my church website here. At church, we listen to the preacher and sing songs. I Love To Praise Him is a typical song we might sing. I love acapella music.
Afterwards, my family goes out to eat. Then home to relax. I usually work on my homework until midnight. That is pretty much my day. If I’m lucky, I eat two meals on a Sunday. But, this is not usually the case. Today, we just had Chinese food!
For this day of recording, my children accompanied me. They thought it was fun to be in a video. My daughter was slightly hesitant, but when she realized that everything would be sped up, she didn’t mind anymore. I didn’t really enjoy this assignment because I had to carry the camera around and pull it out at weird times. That takes a lot of adjustment for me. Ultimately, I got it done. Welcome to my fairly boring life!
As you can see, I spend a lot of time driving. This particular day wasn’t even that bad. Normally, I spend 6-8 hours per day in my car. It was good to test out my new vlog camera. It did pretty well. I was concerned because my car is very shaky. Everything looks pretty good though. The only problem is near the end of the video where I was holding the camera rather than having it clipped to me. I’ll remember to keep if clipped next time to reduce some of the rough movements. I’ve learned so much about creating video and I can’t wait for this course to end so that I can put these things into effect.
I created this video using my iPhone and recording the videos throughout the day. When I had them all finished, I then used iMovie to combine them all, and add some music to the background, as well as include a title page.
This week, we were assigned to pick 3 projects from the DS106 assignment bank. I chose to do a video assignment, gif assignment, and a design assignment. At first I was overwhelmed with all of the choices. It was difficult to decide what I wanted to do based on its difficulty and how much time it would take. I tried to pick ones that I would enjoy, but also wouldn’t take too much time since I had a lot of work in my other classes as well. Overall, I had a lot of fun creating these projects. It helped me find more free online editors that I can now use for future assignments or just for fun. My favorite project was the design assignment. They ended up taking a bit more time than expected, mostly because of technical difficulties, but I got them done. Let’s get started.
Animated GIF Assignment
The first assignment I did was to create a GIF. You had to use the GIF of Clint Eastwood looking behind him and add your own GIF for him to look at. It’s kind of hard to explain in words, but there’s an example inserted below. This is rated at 3 stars and I would agree. Although if I had Photoshop, I might even rate it at 2 stars instead. The hardest part of this assignment was actually finding free software that I could use to edit the GIF’s. Other than that, it was fairly easy and didn’t take long once I found an online editor. The example has My Little Pony in the background. I switched it to a GIF of Tina, from Bob’s Burgers, dancing.
To create it, I used an online editor called Kapwing. It was easy to use, but the downside is that it puts a watermark on the GIF. In this case, it would be easy to crop out, but in others it might be more of a challenge. I would have preferred to just use Photoshop for something like this. I don’t have Photoshop though and I didn’t have time to go to my school’s computer lab, so I just found an editor myself. Either way, the site was easy to use and I would use it again if I don’t have better software.
The next assignment I picked is an every hour vlog of my day. I chose this from the video assignment because I already pretend to be a Youtuber anyways so why not do it for real? I mean everyone has pretended to do a tutorial right? Without the camera it’s funny to act like you have an audience. Because of that, this was pretty easy for me. I take videos of myself to send to friends all the time on Snapchat. Oddly enough, when I had to do the same thing for class, I found that it was hard at first to be in front of the camera. I got over it pretty quickly though and had fun filming my day.
I used Snapchat to record my videos every hour because you’re limited to 1 minute videos. I didn’t want my videos to be too long since it was a vlog of my whole day. I also used Snapchat because I wasn’t sure that my phone would have enough storage for all of the footage. After recording everything, I spliced the videos together on my phone using iMovie. I think it would have been easier to edit the video on a computer, but I thought it would be too time consuming to send each separate clip to myself. After editing them in iMovie, I uploaded the whole video to my laptop then uploaded it to Youtube. The worst part about this assignment is that although I liked doing it, it was annoying that I couldn’t finish it in a couple of hours. I know that’s the point, but nevertheless I just wanted it to be done. It was also frustrating that it took so long to upload to Youtube. I’ve never posted a video so I don’t know if that’s normal or if I just had a bad connection. Eventually, it got posted and now it’s live for the world to see.
Design Assignment
The last assignment I did was designing a house. The example design was a build in Minecraft. I don’t play Minecraft, so I built a house in the Sims 4. The prompt was to build either a cottage, tiny home, or a mansion. I chose to build a tiny home because a mansion would take too long and I just didn’t want to build a cottage period. In the Sims 4 you can actually specify if you’re building a tiny home and it sets specific parameters for how bid your house can be. I already play Sims way too much and I’m very familiar with it so this was an easy choice. Playing the game itself, of course, was very enjoyable, but everything else was kind of a disaster.
The disaster actually started after I had already been building for a while. I screen recorded the whole thing, so you’ll be able to see where everything messed up. I started my build by taking a house from the Gallery. The Gallery is basically a community in the game where you can share your creations. I used a house that someone else built as a template to get started with my build. Once I figured out the dimensions I began building the different rooms and inserting furniture. It’s pretty typical for my game to go kind of slow at times and skip around. This time instead of just pausing for a second and coming back on, it completely shut down. So I lost everything and had to start my build completely over. At this point, I was pretty frustrated because I had already spent a lot of time finding the house I wanted to use and opening the game takes a while itself. Alas, I still had to get the assignment done. I started everything over. I took more precautions this time by saving more often and making sure I didn’t have too many programs open on my computer. Everything was going fine until I realized my screen recording has stopped. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but I didn’t notice I stopped recording until I was already done building. Even though that was super frustrating, at least I didn’t have to start over again. Losing some footage isn’t the worst thing in the world for this project.
Finally, after I was done building, I edited the video on Clipchamp. This online video editor was actually way easier to use than I had expected and it’s free….well for the first video at least. I didn’t really look into the cost of subscribing. Since it is free, I expected to not be able to do as many edits as I wanted, but I ended being able to do everything. I sped the video up 16x, otherwise it would’ve been like a 3 hour video, added text, and final photos. I then uploaded it to Youtube. As I’m writing this, I’m just now realizing I forgot to add background music. So the whole video is silent….. At this point I really don’t have the time to go back and re-upload it. Hopefully you can still enjoy the video though, even if you have to listen to your own music.
For one day, take a short video during every hour you’re awake, and then string the clips together to create a montage. The goal is to make a complete video that gives the person watching a full picture of your day. Experiment with video production and be creative! Try out different transitions, visuals, etc.
This assignment is based off of Jordan Taylor’s videos—check them out if you need some inspiration! (Note: in each Every Hour Vlog, Jordan filmed every hour on the hour. You don’t need to be quite as strict as that, but make sure you get at least one clip every hour.)
