It’s the end of week 10 already?! Where does the time go?

This week’s topic was ‘reading movies’. If you think this sounds too fun to be a school assignment, you’re right. It was a lot of fun. I would recommend this course just for this one week of reading movies.

For this week as well as the next three weeks, we will be working with clipping and combining videos. For this reason, I downloaded some software that will help me with this. I downloaded MPEG StreamClip. I already had Windows Movie Maker on my laptop so I didn’t need to do that. I have used the Windows Movie Maker once before. It is very user friendly and was easy to figure out. However, I will consult with one of these YouTube videos if I get stuck.

In order to read movies, you have to pay attention to detail. And that doesn’t just mean watch closely and don’t worry about the popcorn you’re spilling all over yourself. Really pay attention to detail. I had to watch a clip three times: one with just watching the camera angles and lighting, one with just listening to audio, and the other with both elements. You might think that you won’t catch new things, but you do. Read about what I learned during my three time review here.

From my three time review, I made my very first video! I combined two clips from the movie I did my three time review on. The reason I chose to combine these two clips was because I wanted to show how these two clips, like the clip I did my three time review on, used audio to enhance {that’s the word I was looking for during the Google Hangout on Wednesday!!!!} the scene. I hope you enjoy my first video ever made!

We explored YouTube genres this week. Yes, according to previous DSers, YouTube has genres! Check them out on this Google Doc. I contributed to this Google Doc as well. If you are not able to pick out which video I contributed, read my blog post about it. It would be fun if we could put one of the video assignments we make next week into one of these genres!

To prepare for next week, I had to plan out my video assignments. Believe it or not, I had a hard time picking which assignments I wanted to do. Hopefully we won’t have to just do two. I saw a couple more that I wanted to do. I planned out the two assignments to a tee. Maybe next week, things will be easier to put together since I already planned everything out. Sometimes the planning takes just as long for me as the actual assignment!

This week, we had to do two DCs. I tried to pick DCs that I could relate to movies somehow. After all, it IS reading movies week. You can see how well I did tying in the movies to my DCs here. I have a feeling that since we are starting to tie our DCs to topics {last week we had to tie them together, and this week with movies}, we are going to have to do something along those lines for our final project.

Besides everything I already mentioned, I also participated in the Google Hangout on Wednesday! It was my first hangout and it was a good experience. It was very fun to talk with the super pros about reading movies and how to do it. I got some great advice on software that I can use in the later weeks {which I already did!}. I had fun during the Google hangout and I’m glad we had two hangouts this week – Professor Levine accidently forgot Brittany and I signed up on Wednesday!

Blog title post: Lights – Elli Goulding. Because we are preparing for video week…the ‘camera’ and ‘action’ will come later :)