Term 1 is officially coming to a close and though that means that we are closer to the winter holiday, it also means that report cards are coming up. Report cards mean grades and grades, mean reflection. That’s what today is all about. I am here to reflect on all the awesome and not so awesome work that I have done so far. This is really focussed in one thing. Video making! We have made so many videos this year it’s crazy. However, since I have made so many videos, why don’t I make this easier by just talking about what I learned. You know, to save you some grief.

So what have I learned? I have first learned about how to take proper videos. Before even taking the videos I need to know what I want to film. What types of things do I need clips of? Never shoot vertically! This includes how I position the camera, what I am getting in the clip and things like the quality. Can I see what I’m filming? Does it look good? What about the audio quality? Things like that. Then there is of course editing. Do I need all of these clips? Hint; the answer is no. What kind of music is there in the background. I have to make sure that the viewer can see and hear what’s in the video too. And of course publishing it. While I was doing all of this, I was also making sure to  practice the competencies; empowered learner, knowledge constructed, innovative designer, creative communicator, and computational thinker. So, let’s break things down.

Empowered learner;

The first step would have to be planning. A lot of these video we had to make in groups which means that communication is key. The best example of this that I can think of would have to be my revolution videos. This was a 6 week project that we did in order to learn about revolutions and why they happen. This was a group project so we had to make sure that we were communicating with each other and that we all stayed on top of our work in order to not drag everyone else down. I thought that I was really good at finishing my work and helping my team during the project. One thing that I really bad at was editing the videos. I finally managed to figure out that you can crop in iMovie and I thought that I used my iMovie skills way better in the Take Your Kid to Work day video. I will talk more on that later. I thought that my main skill in this project was animations. I found that Keynote and Explain Everything were really helpful and I created most of the animations in our videos. If I were to do this project again, I would want to make sure that my group films 3 or 4 day before the video is due. This way we have more time to edit and retake scenes that we don’t like.

Knowledge Constructer;

Since I mentioned it, why don’t I talk about editing? This was definitely not my best skill but it has gotten better. Well to be honest, I think it was okay in the beginning, then we started to learn about these cool features that we could use and it got worse. After I figured out how to actually use these cool features, it started to get a lot better again. A great example of this is both the ghost town video and the Take Your Kid To Work Day video. In my opinion the TYKTWD (Take Your Kid To Work Day) video is a lot better than the Ghost town video but there are sides. The Ghost Town video, we worked on as a group. I did most of the editing and added the music and such but at this point I had barley used iMovie. So I would like to say that for a beginner this was a fairly good job. And to top it off we had a few comedians in our group that helped to make our video funny which made it way more entertaining.

https://youtu.be/T_1J_gH9Q_Y

Innovative Designer;
The TYKTWD video was done completely individual. So from planning out the kinds of shots that I wanted to take to filming and then to editing, it was defiantly a piece I was proud of. While working on this video I discovered more about how to control the volume, the transitions, cropping video and photos and adding text. The last one, adding text, was the one that I was most proud of figuring out how to do. When I think about it now, it is actually really easy to do but it took me a while to figure out the timing. I also liked this video better because I was using the new animations skills that I had learned in Keynote. I thought that because the intro animation and ending animation used the same kind of transition, it helped keep the whole video together. The one thing that I didn’t like about the video was the fact that I was speaking so fast. I can’t really compare this to the Ghost Town video because it was a silent film but it’s still pretty easy to hear that I’m talking very fast. The main reason for this was because I had a time limit that I was trying to reach. If I didn’t have that I think that it could have sounded better but then the viewer might get bored. I definitely still need to work on my ability to stay focussed on a point and not getting sidetracked.

Computational Thinker and Creative Communicator;
The final video I will mention for today is the Alberta video. I was focussing on artists for this video and had to interview a lot of strangers. This means socializing. Yes, I socialized. This video really made me problem solve and search for effective solutions to problems that I faced. One of these problems was talking to strangers. In order to overcome this I decided to get my friend, Grace(link), to help me interview. This ended up going really well and I got 4 interviews from different perspectives. I found that making this video helped me in understanding the kinds of things that I need to get on video in order to communicate my point clearly. This was shown when I was conducting the interviews. Some of the people I interviewed talked about one thing for so long, which was great, while others I was able to ask 4 questions in under a minute. This made me realize I was probably asking the wrong questions. Through many trials and errors I was able to understand what kinds of prompts I could use in order get a person to say what it is I wanted to express. That was really a key thing that I learned.

Whew, that was a lot of talking! Hope you enjoyed!