iMovie Projects

Our video topic was communication. As a group, we decided to cover various aspects of communication, moving from personal to impersonal. Maureen took the personal side of the topic. Her footage covered the overwhelming, cloying side to being an RA and her inability to escape from her residents. Rushaun took the middle ground, covering social media, which tends to be less personal, but still involves interaction with others. I covered long-distance communication and the more impersonal or international side of the topic.

Our group worked well together and our videos had a good flow between them. I had some experience with iMovie already, so the program was not as much of a challenge for me as getting footage that I really liked and enough of it to create the one minute and twenty second video. Because the second section, Rushaun’s video, was focused on social media, we wanted to transition between each of our films using forms of social media; a phone call for Maureen and a Skype call for me.

Because I covered travelling, I wanted to have footage from various places. Obviously time and money were limited, so I couldn’t get international footage (with the exception of Canada), but I was able to go to Pittsburgh and Providence. Every time I went to edit, I realized that I needed more and more footage, so I would venture back out with my camera and a better idea of what I wanted to film or what needed to be changed in the project. In the end, I had at least an hour of footage to work with, which allowed for a great deal of selection for my video.

The next struggle was to figure out how to organize the footage. At first, I tried to put similar topics together. I had all of the footage of being in the car, then anything that involved the airport and planes, all of the train footage, and so on. However, the video did not flow very well and did not create the mood I wanted the film to have. Then I tried to mix up the clips so that similar topics were spread throughout the film. I feel that this strategy gives the impression of constant motion and constant communication that I wanted to convey in my portion of the movie.

I left out the transitions until the very end of my editing because I wanted to make sure the clips were in an order that I liked. This really threw off the timing of several of my clips. They no longer moved to the music and some of the footage went by too fast to be able to see what was happening. Because of this, I started to play around with the precision editor.  

The precision editor is a tool I steered clear of in the past because it seemed so complicated, but this time I had a specific goal in mind of lengthening the clips. Due to this fact, I was able to tell if the changes I was making were altering the video in the way that I wanted and the precision editor made much more sense. I realized that it is not quite as complicated as I thought, just very sensitive, so it can be difficult to maneuver.

When it came to working together in class, our group was able to work very well. We made helpful suggestions for each other’s films because we knew what each person was trying to convey and how our videos needed to tie together. Throughout the project, everyone seemed to be on the same page. Maureen had no experience with iMovie, so I was able to help her learn how to use the program and offered some tips and tricks that I use in my own editing. In turn, she was able to comment on my video and suggest any changes that I could make or footage that I could add.

We were moving along well and felt that our videos were almost ready to be put together, when all of Maureen’s files were lost and she could no longer open her video.  This put us behind a bit, but we intended to finish the project the following Tuesday and stay after class or meet Wednesday if we really needed to.

On Tuesday, the hurricane kept me in Providence and I was not going to be able to make it to class, so I texted the other members of my group. Maureen told me that she had dropped the class the day before, but we could have her files to work with if we needed them. Rushaun and I tried to come up with a new plan now that we thought we had to figure out how to tie her footage into our project, which was going to have to be done from scratch because her files were missing from the video. Unfortunately, we were not able to meet until the Thursday the project was due because I still was not able to get home until Wednesday night.

On Thursday, the only things missing from our own projects were the transitions and the credits, but we had the footage we needed for those.  We met up in the morning to make final edits to our portions of the video and, with the exception of Maureen’s video and the combining of our movies, we had everything prepared for class. When we got to class and realized that we didn’t need to add Maureen’s section, we were able to easily combine our movies in a way that still flowed fairly well from personal, local communication to less personal, international communication, the goal that we were aiming for in the beginning.

Until the final week, the project was relatively painless and I am happy with the final product that Rushaun and I were able to put together.

Video can be a much more interactive form of communication than writing and/or photographs. It includes movement and sound that makes the viewer feel almost as though they are actually there, something that can not be done in as realistic a way in writing or photography. Viewers are able to hear the sounds and see the motion of things that would just be described in writing or shown in a photograph. It is much more lifelike and easier to connect to.

Video can also be used as a communication tool in the form of video chats with programs such as Skype or ooVoo. Regardless of distance, conversations using these programs is almost the same as having a conversation in person, with the exception of physical contact.

Choosing a place to upload a video can indicate a lot about the creator and the audience they are attempting to reach. I tend to think of Vimeo as a higher-quality version of YouTube. The videos posted on the site tend to be more advanced than the videos on YouTube. The camera quality is typically better, and the editing is much more appealing, as YouTube videos are rarely edited at all.

YouTube seems to be a better place to reach more people, but Vimeo is more professional. They offer tutorials, options for sharing and the comments tend to be more positive and offer useful feedback, as opposed to the argumental or pointless comments often found on YouTube.