This week, the video assignments were more challenging than assignments in previous weeks. There weren’t as many free resources for videos (as far as I can tell, anyway). Most of the alternatives to iMovie that I found either cost money or are not as robust. Even though there were fewer assignments this week, there was more of a learning curve for me because I have never really edited a lot of video and have never used iMovie.
I learned after the first video assignment that I needed to hold the camera in the landscape position when recording. Otherwise, I would end up with black bars on the side of my video. Later, I saw that you can choose the aspect ratio for the project, so maybe the trick to preventing the black bars is simply choosing the correct aspect ratio and making sure all of my clips were recorded the same way.
I had some trouble adding the title and credits. I wanted to try rolling credits, but I couldn’t find that option in iMovie. I also couldn’t find a good tutorial for this. I ended up sticking with the preset options for adding text. It also took me awhile to learn how to fade music in and out, but I finally figured it out.
My video about my experiences in Afghanistan was emotionally taxing. While I knew that at some point I was going to return to my English 111 and NPR story to try telling it again, I probably shouldn’t have chosen to tell this story for one of multiple assignments due during an accelerated five-week summer course. I think to tell this story again, I would need a team of psychiatrists on standby (and a lot of whiskey). It ended up taking me a lot longer than it should have solely because of the emotional impact.
