Week #6- Mini-Art School: Working with Videos and Moving Images

Creating a Storyboard

I confess that as I thought about creating the storyboard, I had to put the 'storyboards' together in my head first.  As I work to catch up, I knew I wanted to use a subject that was readily available and one with which I was fairly familiar.  During my day light time at home, which is really such a rarity, I had the opportunity to watch the newest addition to our family, Rogue, an 18 month old really sweet cat, who is just bounding with energy, adjust to her new environment. Since we have been training her to be an inside/outside cat, I have really enjoyed watching her fine tune her stalking ability.  She is so very slow... and cautious... And everything around our house is just soooo interesting to her!  During my time off, I read that cats have hearing so sharp they can hear a bottle cap three blocks away!  That would explain why she will suddenly perk up; as if an alarm had just gone off!   

For these reasons, she seemed like the perfect subject.  I did (physically) have a hard time getting down on the ground to gain her perspective on the world... but she really was a great co-worker!  She nuzzled up to me and almost on cue, listening to the birds around her, decided the sparrow in the bush was a great target!  (For those of you for whom this  may be an issue, she was unsuccessful, as she is most of the time!)  

Let Me Introduce You to Rogue...

Rogue

(For whatever reason, I was unable to embed the video into the blog)

                                  

As for the contents of my video, I thought I hit the one minute mark, but alas, when it was uploaded to YouTube, it was marked at 58 seconds.  I confess that after 6++ hours of work (mostly spent on trying to clip and add music to the project) I left it at 58 and called it a day.

And so much work to make try to make it exact!  I used my iPhone for the videos and iMovie for the project.  For the most part, since this wasn't my first iMovie, I didn't struggle with the project parameters except of course for the exact 1 minute mark.  Tweaking the transitions and the clip lengths was, for the most part, tedious because the software wouldn't always let me change a clip from 4:37 to 4:02.  Somehow, presets often made the clip longer instead of shorter.    As for the video itself, Hagen & Golombisky(2013) provide us with ways to make our work more interesting.  The infusion of text, transitions, and 'The Ken Burns Effect" were used to pace and balance the presentation.  I attempted to become one with Rogue's line of sight as well as her conscious mind-reader (from the above shots) in order to change the focal length and perspectives as much as possible.

I tried something new on this project: I added music.  I confess that I liked the video better when it was silent, but I pushed myself to add music for the simple fact that my knowledge of music, in general is poor, but I didn't think that should cause me to limit my skill in adding it to a media piece.  I tried to add music that would give some comic relief to a video about my cat; not perhaps the  most universal subject but one that was my most knowable subject.  I also confess that I like using sites like Animoto, because the theme determines the music and the transitions and it ulitmately makes a more sophisticated looking presentation because the 'glue' behind the pieces wasn't designed by someone with limited skills (like myself), but I pushed myself to include new techniques.