Welcome back to my blog. Today we’re going to be talking about our Maker project, “Witness to History”.

“Witness to History” was all about taking a step back and realizing that we are in an unfolding history lesson. As a once in a 100 year disease is plaguing the world, people are needing to adapt. And that’s what this project is about, specifically how the music industry is adapting during coronavirus.

I’ll be breaking this post down into three parts, #1 is the important milestones, and how one answered the driving question #2 what is the answer to the driving question and #3: the final project.

While there was a main driving question, we also had to make our own smaller driving question that related to our topic. My smaller question was “how has coronavirus affected the music industry”?

Part #1

The first milestone that I’ll be talking about is “research”. Research is, as I am learning, one of the most helpful stepping stones to everything.

I have never been good at doing research before the final milestone, which then leads to me panicking and searching for information at the very end, which is time I could have used editing. This time however, I did things like spending a day making a research notes document, I backed up all my ideas and assumptions with news articles proving I was correct. Then I backed up those articles with more reputable articles. I researched relevant people that I could reach out to for an interview, and even if I got someone to do it with, I had a backup just in case. (Which proved very helpful).

Part #2

The second milestone to talk about is “storyboard”. Again, like researching, I underestimated the importance of this step in previous projects. But this time, I really tried to do everything in the right order. It turned out to be super helpful, because I didn’t have to worry about which shots to use or which angles I needed to have. The only hard things about making a storyboard is that, if you’re like me, you have a ton of ideas and you want to do everything, except you can’t. You don’t have room for it all. You also have to live with the fact that you might change some shots when you’re actually filming the video. For example, in one of the slides it shows a family listening to music. However, when it came to filming, I just went with a video of me on my iPad listening to music alone, because it was easier to control as a director, and it would mean I didn’t have to rely on anyone else.

The “storyboard” milestone was the one that answered the driving question “how can we, as video storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?”

The answer I found was, “as video storytellers, we can still document what is happening in our world today, even while at home and physical distancing outside”. We can do that by going for walks and videoing the empty roads and paths in our area. We can reference and use news articles in the videos we make. We can video out our window as a time lapse and include helpful and detailed voiceovers to explain what’s going on. So, as you see, we have many tools at our disposal that we can use to cover everything we need.

Part #3:

The final project was nothing short of stressful. With lining up interviews, trying to get the right angles for my video shots, and then trying to get backup interviews, it was very challenging. Although, one of the hardest challenges of all, aside from anything to do with animations, was the editing. In total it took me two and a half days of editing to get the whole video done. There was also the fact that I had a fifteen minute interview and I could only use two minutes maximum. It was fair to say that the interview took up most of my time for editing. This might’ve been because I spent way too long trying to actually set up the interview, and wasn’t spending the time getting the actual editing done while I still could.

Even though this was a rage inducing video to make, here is how it turned out. Enjoy!

Thanks for watching, have a great day!