Maker: Story finding in the Rockies.

Another project, another blog post.

I recently went on a trip to the rockies with PLP, and, as it was a PLP trip, there was a whole 2 projects about it, due to the constraints that blog-space logic applies, I can only talk about one of those projects here, and, due to another quirk of blog-space, I should probably start this post pretty quickly.

Quick warning, I’m going to say this in my humanities post as well, but there was a lot of overlap between the projects, so I might repeat myself between the blog posts, or cross reference between them, so just bear with me, Ill also try and provide links back and forth for the more important stuff.

Alright, Back to the trip, while we were on the trip, we worked on a “Multi touch book”, now, most of that is all humanities stuff, and this is a maker post, so lets talk about the maker stuff.,

The “Maker stuff” in question is 4¹ Videos, with 3 of those videos being filmed while I was on the trip, now, the reason they are all videos, is that this project is about making videos. Now that im talking about the actual project, I might as well show you the driving question:

How might I use the moving image to tell a story?

Now, Unless you’ve been reading every single one of my blog posts, you probably wouldn’t have noticed this, but this driving question shares a lot of similarity to that of the “Making Interesting Images” project, from last year:

How might I use the still image to create and communicate through technology?

Now, there’s a pretty obvious difference as well, one is about the “Still Image” or photograph, and the other is about the “Moving image” or video.² But they still share similarities, they are both about communicating something, although the more recent project is more clear about what it is that needs to be, a story.

Now, as I mentioned before, there was four videos we had to make for this project, I’m going to go through them in the order they were completed, just to keep things simple.

Now, even though this project was called story finding in the Rockies, the first video has nothing to do with the Rockies. This is because there is around 50 people in PLP9, so were split up into 2 different trips, each with 24 kids³ , so the teachers didn’t have to deal with the full 50 at once.

I was on Trip no. 2, so, in the week while the first trip was away, we worked on our first video, What Inspires Me, This video was based off of part of the summer learning we did, of the same name. The video was interesting to make because we were given a lot of creative freedom, My video ended up being a sort of self interview/documentary. I’ll talk about it more, but first, here it actually is:⁴

This video was interesting to make for a few reasons, for one, like I mentioned before, this was the first video, so I didn’t have much of an idea as to what the best way to go about things were, so, I ended up just sort of creating problems and solutions⁵, as I went along. I started the whole process by writing a script, I dont really have much of a method for this, so I just end up writing down whatever sounds right, along with some notes about framing, possible B-roll, and stuff like that, and then just refine it as I get to filming it. The Filming of this video was full of the self created problems that I mentioned before, first off, as the camera ( my IPad ) was fairly far away from me, to get good audio, I had to record the audio on my phone, through my earbud mic⁶ and then applied some enhancements to remove all background noise. I also needed to actually read my script⁷, which meant I needed to have my laptop somewhere out of shot, but in my view, which resulted in some wonderfully horrible setups, for one shot, my iPad was balanced on a water cooler, with my laptop on a stack of books and boxes, all on top of a rolling chair. luckily I only needed one or two takes, so I didnt have to use it for too long.

The next video⁸ was the first one to be filmed on the trip, ⁹and it was a group project, A silent film, It was to be filmed at the three valley gap ghost town, on the first day of our trip. As I mentioned before, I don’t really have a process for writing a script, and pretty much the entire video had to be planned before hand, as we would have limited time to film on location. Everything turned out okay in the end, and we wrote up a mostly coherent story, as well as some rudimentary shot descriptions, provided by me. When we arrived at the ghost town, we had a bit to look around, so we could double-check the locations we wanted to film in. We did end up having to change a few of our locations, as they wouldn’t have let us get the right angles for some shots. we also had to add on a whole extra part to the beginning of our video, because it turns out out script wasn’t quite as coherent as we thought. Even though we had to make a lot of adjustments, I still think our video turned out pretty well, so here it is:

Now, the next video is the “Vertical Aspect Ratio, Short-Form-Content style video”, This video was filmed over the course of the trip, It was also pretty interesting, because it was very spontaneous, I came up with the idea right near the beginning of the first walk we did, when the song in the video popped into my head,¹⁰ so, I took out my phone, and took a short video of me walking, I continued doing this on most of the hikes we did along with at some other interesting places. after the trip, I took the videos and put them in order with the music, along with some other videos me and James took. There’s not much else to say about the video, so, here you go:

Now for the last video in this project, the Investigative video, Like I said before,¹¹ technically only 3.5 of the videos were maker, this one is the 0.5, The reason for that, is because this videos planning was in Humanities, and not just because of weird timing. Now, right now, I’m working on the blog post for Humanities, so, if you’re reading this right after I release this blog post, it wont be here, check again in 4 days or so, if you are reading it after the humanities post releases, this explanation probably won’t be here, Either way, Ill talk more about the humanities parts of this project In that post. Now, lets talk about the maker parts.the maker parts, in question, is mostly the editing of the video, For the video, I did 3 interviews while I was on the trip. so, when I got back, all I needed to do was put them all together, right? not really, because 3 interviews on their own, is just that, 3 interviews, the point of the video is to support my thesix, so I had to do that, I ended up writing a quick script, and recording beginning and end bits so I could explain the interviews and what they are supposed to support. I ended up wanting to have a green screen effect, which meant I needed a green screen, I found some green fabric, and attached it to my wall, I’m honestly impressed it worked as well as it did, as this is what the setup looked like:¹²

So. I filmed the beginning bit, and edited it in along with the interviews,¹³ and then, I got sick, and couldn’t film for the whole weekend, and, after the weekend, I was like 3 days past the “deadline”, so I didn’t edit the end bit in, but of course, the “deadline” wasn’t actually the deadline, so I added in the ending bit, and this is what the final video looks like:

Anyways, with that, I think this is a perfect time to end this blog post, although you can still read the footnotes¹⁴