For the past few weeks, the PLP class has been working on revolutions…
and steampunk,
mainly working up to a big project that revolves around a specific revolution in history and making a metaphor machine out of it with a steampunk aesthetic. The metaphor machine has to have the causes and consequences of different events during our assigned revolutions, so to give us a better understanding on cause and consequence, we took a look into the Industrial Revolution and the different aspects of it. Once we got comfortable with it, we were told to make an EE (Explain Everything) on three causes and consequences that the railways had on Britain during the Industrial Revolution.
We started with a written draft which was essentially making a script for the narration in the video and a written description of some of our visuals in the EE. Once we were approved, we could start working on the EE using the written draft as a layout for the video.
There were some basic requirements for the video, one of the toughest for me being that we needed to use “Creative Commons” photos
which are basically non-licensed pictures that we can use, share, edit, etc. The reason that was more of a challenge for me is because of how I make my videos. My style of editing and making videos is a little different. I like making quick cuts to pictures throughout the video which are relevant to what I’m talking about. The reason Creative Commons photos make the video a little harder to create is that there aren’t as many high quality and relevant photos that I would prefer to have in my video. For example, if I’m looking for a specific picture, I can probably find many pictures that I like that relate to what I was searching for, but when I search using the Creative Commons filter, I find less pictures that I like and sometimes have to settle with the best I can find. My solution to that was drawing out pictures in the situations where there weren’t any photos on the internet I liked. It worked pretty well and helped fill in the gaps where there wasn’t anything going on in terms of visuals.
I started the video by recording my narration before anything else, putting the the different introduction narration into the first slide, and the different causes and consequences in corresponding order in their own slides, and finishing with the conclusion in the final slide. I could then just listen to the narration and figure out when and where to insert my pictures/drawings with ease.
Once we finished our EEs, we would trade iPads with someone else and critique each other’s EE. We did this twice, but on my first time around, I had only done my written draft, so there wasn’t really much to give feedback on rather than just my writing. On the second time around though, I got feedback from Calum, and fixed my EE accordingly. Some of the points he made were that my video was wayyyy too long and that he got bored part way through, that I talked about how it helped my understanding on steampunk, but I never mentioned anything about it in the video, and that I would repeat my points during the start and finish of my video. I definitely agreed with his points and edited my EE using his feedback. Starting with the length of the video, I cut down the video from 5 minutes to 3 minutes without (in my opinion) dropping the quality of the video. I mainly cut down on the intro and conclusion as I realized I could take down two birds with one stone by shortening those two slides. What I mean by that is that I repeated my points in both the intro and conclusion, which made the video seem pretty repetitive. So on top of cutting down on the length of the video, I was also able to take out the repetitiveness of the video. I also realized that I talked about how it helped my understanding on steampunk which truthfully, it didn’t, and removed that from the video as well. What I ended up with was an improved version of my original EE, which I’m pretty happy about.
Overall, I liked working on this Mini-project, as I like making EEs (no matter how time consuming they are for me sometimes.) Making videos based on my thoughts of a certain topic is definitely something I enjoy doing and I hope to be doing something like this again later on in the year.
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