On the Movie Making Trail

 

Sitting here thinking I could not make a movie and guess what? I did! There was a process to the entire thing though and I definitely am no movie producer or film major. I found out how important planning out sequence and pacing was. I did not take much stock in the planning nor did I really understand how much time some scenes would take. Thank goodness that the plan was pretty solid or else the video would have been a total fail.

 

Throughout this process I had a partner,  Jessica Nelson. While I videoed, Jessica directed our student and participated in the video by making a cameo as well as helping with the sound effects. Together we came up with the topic and sequencing of events. We are both Special Education Majors who deal with alot of behaviors in the classroom. We had the idea of recording a video of a social story that we have used in the classroom. Social stories are formatted to fit a specific child and voiced in the first person allows the student to understand what kind of behavior is expected of him or her.

 

To shoot this video we used an Ipad to capture the video aspect. We had a few takes for each step. We then transferred the files to Jessica's Mac where we used IMovie to edit the video. At first it took awhile to figure out how to get our clips to the IMovie section. Thank goodness for Apple Support that walked us through many of the steps of movie making in IMovie. Editing took us a few tries, playing with the cropping of the individual scenes as well as using different transitions. All in all, IMovie proved to be a user friendly tool for even the most "untechy" of aspiring teachers. Using this in the classroom will prove to be quite easy as you just point and shoot. Using IMovie will not be much more difficult as long as intensive and step by step insturction is given. After a few tries I do not see why even an elementary student like ours could not do this on his or her own and the middle school and high school students could find endless possibilities.

 

We tried to use Voice Thread to create the audio portion of our video which comes in the form of narration. We had a very difficult time trying to start the video and get the recording of the narration at the right timing. We tried a few times before we gave up and found out that we could add sound through IMovie. Again thank you Apple Support. After this it was smooth sailing. We even found out how to compress the file so that it was easier to upload to Youtube.

It was quite a journey through our first ever movie making experience.
To see what we thought was a neat idea of making a video of a social story click play below!

 

 

Also check out some of my peer's videos to see some other neat ideas to use when creating movies!
Jessica Weldon
Alex Morin