Movie Making: Daydreaming

This past week myself and a few of my classmates made a movie for our class assignment. We struggled for a while trying to decide what we were doing. We threw around a few ideas and at first we wanted to do a motivational video, with the theme of "why teach." We had some really inspirational ideas, but when it came down to it, none of us wanted to talk on camera...so that idea was out. For our next idea we wanted to come up with something that had more movement and we could film in multiple locations, but also related to school. We came up with the idea of daydreaming, which is something we all do in class even if we have good intentions. This was a fun way for all of us to be a part of the video. We had four students and one teacher, and excluding the teacher we each had our own dream sequence. Once we had finished filming we took all the video clips taken on my Iphone, and put them into Imovie. After using Imovie for my digital story, I had some experience and was now comfortable with it. As a group we worked with Imovie, putting all the clips together, we also looked for music for each dream scene. Even though some of my group mates didn't have a mac, they were able to learn how Imovie worked and how easy it can be to put together a short movie.
Creating little movies is fun and creative way to get our students excited about learning. Many kids are already making their own videos on youtube, so this is a way to help engage our students, and use technology to get them involved, and working together.

Here is our movie!

Digital Story! Viggo the Vegan

Creating a digital story has been an interesting challenge for me. The first challenge I had to overcome was deciding which platforms to use. There are so many to choose from, I was debating using imovie, slideshare, or powerpoint. Then I had to figure out what I was going to use for audio recording, and how I was going to put it all together. 

For the visual aspect of the story, I needed to decide what types of images I was going to use and how I wanted it to look. I wanted to use illustrations, but I am not an artist, so I needed to find one that was willing to let me use their work. I created an account on a website called “storybird,” (www.storybird.com) this is a website that creates a platform for you to write your own story. It has artwork that has been added by many different artists that have given their approval for the use of their artwork. This is how I found the inspiration for my story. Looking through the many photos I found some artwork of a leopard who looked like he might be a vegetarian. Because I am a vegetarian I felt a little bit of a connection with this funny leopard and his lifestyle choice. I gathered the photos together and from looking at the pictures I put together a story which I decided to write as a poem. Using storybird you can publish your story to their website, and buy a pdf file of your story. Also if you were interested you can buy a physical copy of your book that they will print and mail to you.

I needed to add music to my story, and after listening to a bunch of different songs on youtube, I landed on the song “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the sky, which I then download on ITunes. In order to put the story and audio together to I put them into IMovie, using this program I was able to put the two together. Also in IMovie I was able to create my own narration recording. After several attempts at recording myself reading my story with several fumbles in my words, I decided to get my husband to give it a go. His recording was very clear and free or my word fumbles in one take, so I decided to use his recording. It took me a while to put the three together, getting the slides and the narration to line up and getting the right balance in both audio recordings.

But the end I was proud of what I came up with. My digital short story is about a vegetarian leopard who searches for friendship and acceptance of his lifestyle choices.

Check out my digital story:

A Pep Talk

While I was watching this video I was thinking about social media and the fact that it is amazing that we can share these types of things with each other. I believe that this also demonstrates how as teachers we can help our students share their ideas and inspirations with the world. All it takes is some creativity to let kids get what they want to say out into the world, and people will watch it.