This week definitely had an overall feeling of me not really loving Windows Movie Maker, at all. Seriously it was awful. The whole transitioning from one thing to the next made my head spin. The typical process was to get a video from YouTube, download it to an mp4 using KeepVid.com, from there I could convert it to a wmv using an online video converter which then allowed me to import videos into Windows Movie Maker. For music, I used this website to get them from YouTube to an importable mp3 file. However, very often Windows Movie Maker would stop showing what I had in my timeline which would cause me to save and restart my whole entire process. It really got to being a pain after about the first time (and it happened a lot of times). While it was very frustrating, the program itself when it was cooperating was not hard to use. It was very easy to trim clips, make credits, and add music. However a lot of the background noise required being put into Audacity all together before being brought to Windows Movie Maker.

However, despite my technical difficulties I found myself really interested in how everything came together. The pre-production was so crucial in every video I made whether it was 5 seconds or 3 minutes long. It all came down the planning the order, the music, and most importantly the message. I had tons of different ideas for so many different projects that I was completely inspired to do so many. However, I somehow ended up not being able to tell a story through all of them, and I have to keep remember how critical that really is.

I think the biggest thing that I took from all of this though was the music. The background music can really make or break any project, and that was something that I really focused on throughout these weeks (which almost made me go insane). Just one tiny detail can go a very very long way.

So here is my week in a very hyperlinked nutshell. We had to complete 16 stars worth of assignments, and I ended up going a half a star over the limit (hold your applause for the over achieving senior action). The first video that I did (which was 3.5 stars) ended up being my favorite one out of all of the ones I completed. I just think that it told the best story, and only in 5 seconds! Showing a transformation of stories with just a second from 5 different movies really made me focus on what parts of clips were important and what wasn’t. And I really thought that the music in the background was perfect for the clip, once I found that I knew I had made great work. (What a rewarding feeling!). Up next I decided to  do a four star video really dedicated to sound, finding a song that fit with a movie clip. Once I decided what clip I wanted to do, finding a song was really critical. It wasn’t just the lyrics I needed to focus on, but the mood of the song, the timing of the song, and the overall feeling of the song. Did this song change the mood? Did it enhance it? I wanted to find a balance of the two and give a different perspective on a new classic. Up next in the agenda was the four star video involving the Hitch cut phenomenon  which was a lot of fun to do as well. I could not seem to find a good song that fit into what I was trying to show, but I think I did a good enough job in trying to get the message across. It just goes to show how powerful music can be to change what you want to say. Finally, I did a five star 1950s education film about calculus.  This one required the most planning since I had to film it myself and got to think of different camera angles and the coloring as well. It really was interesting, but once again it was not complete until there was music going on in the background.

In between all of that starry madness was also another assignment, the Foley assignment! Here we put the sound effects all together from the class and created another video, but once again showing how you can change the mood with the music. I decided to stick with a more classic vibe, just a bit more dramatic. I really hope someone took a more modern vibe to it, but we shall see!

So overall these past two weeks were frustrating, but well worth it in the end.

Want to see my first test run for the week? I wanted to see how well filming on my iPad and going to my computer would work (which I’m glad I did since I knew to film it holding my iPad the other way) and I tried it out with a spirit video that the UMW Volleyball team decided to make, check it out!

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa