Reflections

Reflecting upon creating a digital story, capturing reality seemed to be one of the hardest parts to me. When you put the camera on a person how much do they change?  Are you telling their reality or their projection?  In my own project I found it hard to get people to speak morally when on camera.  I had wanted to capture more of the little conversations and small moments that happen on a trip.  What I found was that when you begin recording a conversation and asking questions with a camera in someone's face they become more robotic and can have a hard time answering questions casually, in the manner they would converse.

I decided to start simple in this course.  The first module is just clips and photos from my cell phone, linked together in iMovie.  There are no fades, no text and no music overlaid.  I think that my mobile story upped the complexity somewhat from my selfie.  With my selfie I would record myself speaking, stop to throw in a photo, then return to recording myself speaking.  With the mobile story, I recorded a lot of clips of this and that from the trip, wrote and recorded intros and outros and then edited select clips together in the middle to create a story. In retrospect I wish I had a better idea of what to get while going down and had done more alternate takes on certain things but I had enough material to cover the important parts: getting in the van, driving down, making a stop (Starbucks), arriving in Philadelphia to hang out (the restaurant), the venue, bands sets, and driving home.  I wish I had gotten smoother takes of us discussing our favorite parts of road trips and stops.  They came out very flat.  Although I felt that they were not incredible when I took them, I really hated them when I got them home to watch later.  I've always felt that I learn by doing.  In the first video I had one section that was extremely quiet but the mobile story seems to be smoother to hear.  For my next video I would like to write more of a script going in and get more takes.  It was hard because I was attempting to capture people in their environment so I couldn't really script them per se but I could have tried more techniques to get different takes or two try to make it more relaxed.

When purchasing my new computer to go back to school I had this class in mind.  I was able to talk to someone going to school for graphic design about what they use and their thought that the model I selected would be perfect for the class.  They especially told me that iMovie should give me the tools I need at my level to produce the films required for the class.  I loved how intuitive the program was. I honestly didn't read anything but just started playing around.  I understand that the program is not a high end video editor but I was able to learn a lot just by playing around and making these videos.  For what comes next, now that I have played around and learned some basics to get a good feel for the program, I plan to spend more time reading and studying up on what can be done with video editing outside of the course materials to see what can be improved.  I'm excited to see how far I can take the videos after the first two more primitive attempts.