Final Blog post for EDCI 337

Wow, this course flew by so fast!

When I look back now, I can;t help but think about all that I have learned. I entered this class having never edited a film before digitally. Today, I was able to call myself an "expert" when someone asked for help. I was able to answer their questions about titles, transitions, editing, including and extracting audio, and a host of other things. Having spent  number of hours working on my stop motion animation with that program I feel pretty impressed with how much I have learned.

The first day that I was able to join the class, we explored the interactive whiteboard technology. I spent a deal of time playing with SMART Notebook, which I had used on my previous practicum. I was able to show other class members some of the features that I knew about, and also was able to spend time exploring the resources that were provided by Katy. I was really excited to find that there were other webpages that I could use to gain access to lesson-plans, and other resources for the SMART Board.

My own Stop Motion Video has had me searching the web to find free sources of music and sound effects. All the sounds in my film are FLOSS and are not protected by copyright. just finding these sounds took a long time. Two sites that helped me a lot were jsayles.com where a fellow has posted an number of .wav files of himself playing classical guitar. I also signed up for a membership (free) at freesound.org, which provided access to a number of member posted sound effects.

I also had a chance to explore chroma keying technology. The program WAX allowed me to create a film with footage provided by Simon and other class members. I put together two short films, and was very proud of what I created! I will definitely use this program in the future in creating films with students.

I had a very hard time using Gimp and other photo editing tools. Non of my edited photos were "professional looking" but I learned a ton about a technology I had never explored before. I won't be using Paint in the future when I need to edit a photo! I was really interested in the quality of the program, which was a free, portable application. It was quite a complicated program, and allowed the user to use most of the tools available in Photoshop which was another program I explored.

I was very impressed with the screen capture technology that we used. I found the online programs that we used to be very user friendly and easy to understand. In particular I liked the screencast-o-matic.com site, which I used to create a fake tutorial.

The creation of a webpage also took me some time. In particular I spent some time researching and collecting some links that would support students in my classes. As I continue with my career, I believe that I will try to maintain a webpage, because of the ease with which I can use it to disseminate information to my classes and the parents of my students.

I also spent most of one class exploring collaborative drawing websites and mind map/ web creation pages. These were really interesting as well. In particular I can see how googledocs and the interactive whiteboard program dabbleboard.com could be useful in small group situations, for homework groups or for class projects. I had fun exploring these sites with other members of the class, drawing, posting and uploading text, pictures and documents to these sites and then changing them as we wanted.

While I originally started playing around with stop motion animation using my computer's webcam and the programs SMA and Photolapse, I was only able to create short, limited type stop motion animation clips. For my major project, I took several thousand photos with a digital camera I borrowed from the library and explored the iMovie editing program. It took me a good deal of time to create a storyboard, to collect and set up Playmobil figurines and take the thousands of shots I needed to create the footage. I tried to play around with the filming process, using film techniques like zooming in to close ups and changing the camera angle mid scene. I also found that if I accidentally moved the camera out of position, a whole scene of filming would be ruined and I would have to start again.

Once I had the footage, I spent quite a while trying to find a way to get iMovie to show the film at the speed I wanted. To do this I had to adjust the number of frames that each picture would show for (when I imported them into the project- I found out that you couldn't change that setting after you had imported them), because iMovie only allowed frame rates that were too fast and made my footage look very choppy.

I spent a number of hours putting together all the transitions between scenes, lengthening certain parts, and writing the text that would be used to explain the plot. After that I spent at least three hours finding appropriate sound effects and music that was open source and would not violate any copyrights. This was especially important to me as I wanted to be able to use this project in my future teaching.

Overall, the majority of my time with this course was spent working on my Stop Motion Animation project which I felt gave me a chance to develop skills finding free music and sounds, editing films and audio and gave me a ton of experience with Stop Motion Animation creation.