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Monday, April 6, 2015

My First Video! :D

I've recently become a bit obsessed with a couple of beautiful videos from some creative, hilarious minds on the internet.  The first, a Sherlock Crack!Vid that I have watched roughly eight times (now make that nine), and the second, a Doctor Who Disney Musical, which has moved me almost to tears on multiple occasions.  So when we were told to make a "multimedia presentation" using Popcorn, I instead heard "Cali's turn to try her hand at a video like this."  So I picked from one of my other fandoms, and created the following:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- As told by Disney music

Unfortunately, after spending a few hours creating this video, I realized something similar (and somewhat more extensive) already existed.  But even so, I learned a lot from my experience.

Considering the Habits of Mind that we have discussed since the beginning of the semester, this exercise particularly helped me develop creativity, flexibility, and persistence.  This project both demanded and developed a great sense of creativity, not least of all since I had never created anything similar before this.  In all seriousness, the videos I referenced in the introduction required a great deal of creativity to make, and I aspired to make something equally as creative.  This required many artistic decisions of which songs to match up with which scenes in order to construct a meaning true to the original film from outside songs.

This project also demanded much flexibility.  In working with a new medium, I had some difficulty determining what I could and could not do, which influenced the future direction of my project.  This required me to change my approach as I continued working on it.  This was most apparent in the lengths of each song segment.  I began with very long, largely uncut scenes which quickly became rather boring.  As I learned more about the technology I was using, I realized it was necessary to cut and splice together many shorter sections to convey the same ideas in a more interesting, engaging way.

The last habit, persistence, was probably not necessary in this project, but I insisted on making it as close to perfect as I could.  This translated into several additional hours adjusting clips to be in precisely the right location (which meant I had five tracks playing together by the time I finished).  While it did take more time than was absolutely necessary, this resulted in a project that I was actually quite proud of and it taught me the rewards of persistence.

This project revealed some important benefits and drawbacks of using multimedia presentations.  One clear benefit is that, if executed properly, it can provide a concise, engaging presentation related to the topic. A one-minute video can be much more compelling than a page of text presenting the same information.  It also allows the author to be more creative in how they present their message, which can draw a wider audience.  As with any media, however, there are some limitations.  The biggest problem, in my presentation, was due to technological issues.  As I mentioned, I had five tracks that were all timed precisely to fit with one another.  Several times I tried to play them back and one would glitch and become out-of-sync with the others, which in some cases, even somewhat changed the message I was trying to get across (some of you may also have had this problem if you tried watching my video).

For my multimedia project later this semester, I will probably develop some sort of PSA that combines statistics with a limited amount of story telling.  This may be in the form of a video or an interactive infographic.  My topic does not particularly lend itself well to another, more visual medium like what I created here;  it is a very serious topic and such a vivid presentation of it would likely be triggering for some.

So, while I can't create something like this for my actual multimedia presentation, I did learn a lot from this project and I greatly enjoyed my creation.  If you also enjoyed my project, as well as the other links I provided, you may also like this link, which I stumbled upon in collecting the others.

P.S.  Thanks for sticking with me through all of the fandoms in this post (extra thank you if you clicked any of the links!)

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