When watching the video editing clips assigned this week, I realized a really good thesis for this course. In this video, the narrator spoke about how cinema was an invention without a future, and it wasn’t until cinematographers discovered that piecing together different clips could tell a story. Simply put, that is digital storytelling in basic nutshell; combining several different forms of media, and piecing them together to make a story. Without that concept understood, we may not have movies as we know them. Essentially, photographs, sound, video, drawings, writings, and any other art forms from their basic states can be seen as only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to true potential, as proven by the example of cinematography.

This week I was asked to watch a clip form a famous movie three different ways. I first watched it with no sound, then just listened to it, and then I watched it regularly, and wrote notes about each. You can see the blog post here.

The two video assignments I’m thinking of doing are the Play by Play assignment, and the Return to the Silent Film assignment. I like the Play by Play one, because I love sports, so I will probably be able to give a really good play by play commentary (once I get my voice back since I’m sick!) The silent film assignment I want to do because I have some (very little) experience with working with Windows Media Player, and I know about an effect they use to make the video look old. I have very little to almost no video editing experience, so this should be fun!

Daily creates this week were easy. There were two! I wasn’t able to do anything using my voice because I lost it at the beginning of the week, so I just did two photo assignments. This is a picture I took of something that makes me feel my age:
Not only is it VHS, but I grew up on Star Wars as if it was from my generation. These movies bring me back. I took my old VHS box set that I’ve had since I was really young and took a picture by angling slightly up to give it a larger than life perspective, because Star Wars is larger than life.
The other Daily Create I did was a forced perspective assignment. I took a clothes pin and held it up so that it looks like I am using a large one to hold up my bird feeder.

I’m nervous about video assignments because I have already had trouble with it this week. Both of the sites used to download videos from YouTube aren’t working for me. PwnYouTube gives me a message saying it is not possible to download videos anymore, and KeepVid gives me a loading screen for hours and never loads on any of my browsers. However, I have saved bookmarks to some of the Tools for the Trade links I found to be helpful, and I feel like I’m ready. So lets do it!