www.merge-media.org

New website! Stream the videos. Feedback always welcome.

Time for Defense!

It's football season, but this defense is all about the creative thesis project! My thesis is the resulting 6 group videos we made during my collaboration with the 5th grade ICS class. Last year's 5th graders, that is. This year, they're 6th graders! A world of difference.

Since my last post in July, I've re-edited the videos to clean them up some and make them shorter. I also built an additional website (www.brigetteflood.com) where you can stream the videos and where I talk more about the collaboration, our approach and the process. I also got married, so it was a hectic late summer/early fall.

Defense date is scheduled for November 2 at 11 a.m. in Georgia State University's DAEL theater (Digital Arts and Entertainment Lab) . It's open to the public, so feel free to join us if you're interested!

Editing continues in July

Time flies when you're editing. It's July, and I'm still sifting through footage filmed by myself and the students. Though we managed to get both the personal and group videos finished in time to view on the last day of school, I've still got a lot of work to create my overall final thesis project, which I hope to defend this fall.

Ahhh...June

Whoa. There was a big crunch of getting pick up shots and editing during the days after Memorial Day! Because the plan was to watch all 6 group videos together on June 1, the last day of school. That worked out, with only a few technical difficulties. I brought lots of snacks to thank the kids for their hard work in front of and behind the camera. The did a lot of good things during this project, and hopefully learned a thing or two as well.

The entire 5th grade got together to watch them, which was fun. The only bummer was that more than a handful of students weren't there to share in the excitement, because Dekalb County's summer school started that same day, June 1. ICS was on a different schedule, so the ICS students who needed to attend summer school had to miss the last day of their normall school year (which includes many of the international students). I talked with the principal of the Stone Mountain campus, and hopefully I can go back and show the videos again at the beginning of the 2007-08 school year.

Editing Begins...& Only 5 Working Days Left!

We starting editing together today. I hooked my laptop up to the LCD projector in order to work with one video group per class. In true team spirit, Annie took the rest of the kids into the hall to do their writing workshop. Much appreciated, Ms. Perry!

The editing was great! The students viewed existing clips (I'd already imported them into FinalCut Pro and then sorted the clips into folders per each video group) and told me which parts to edit out of the clips. There was a lot of giggling and laughter and cheerfulness...although the girls from the Friends video were all mortified to hear their voices in the videos. Too cute. They think their voices sound too deep and are embarrassed about it. I told them I feel the same way about my voice & I know what they're talking about. But honestly their voices sound just like they do in person. Everyone's getting used to their image and sound on the 'big screen.'

I'll be working with the other 4 groups over the next 2 days to edit the other video clips and to move the projects along. Then I'll probably have to do some fine tuning over the weekend, since we only have 5 school days left to work on videotaping, pick up shots, editing, etc. Yikes! I'm a little stressed about the time. Monday's Memorial Day, so school's out. And we're planning to watch the group and individual projects on Friday, June 1 in a viewing bonanza. It will be a fun last day of school. I'd also like to put both the home video and group projects on DVDs to distribute to the school and students sometime soon. It won't be by June 1. But I can easily do that in time for the first day of school next year.

Individual Video Projects

Ms. Perry and I watched the students' personal videos last night, to make sure they'd followed the assignement (to write a video plan before taping). Some of them are priceless and well done, others had technical problems, and others didn't follow the assignment - they just taped people or things without describing them and seemingly without any plan. So now, about 11 students need to revideo their individual video project, for one reason or another. Zoinks! We only have about 8 days left to get them finished so we can preview them. Hopefully the retakes will be finished by the middle of next week.

Videotaping ending this week...editing next week

The video projects are moving along...sometimes smoothly, sometimes not so smoothly. Today I arrived at ICS over an hour early so the "Day in the Life of Recess" group could videotape recess again. But when I got to school, only one student from the group would take time to actually videotape. Afterward in class, another student from the 'Recess' group asked if he could videotape then. I had to tell him that he'd had a chance earlier but had chosen to play soccer instead of participating in the video project. Bummer for all of us! At this point, we really needed to get that footage taken care of, but the students have to understand their choices matter.

The good news is that all the students who chose to participate in the home video project have taken the video cameras home. Ms. Perry and I are watching them tomorrow night to see if we have all of them and to make sure none of them need to be re-videotaped before we begin to edit them into one vidoe.

Additional good news is that most of our 6 group videos are coming along nicely. We've videotaped almost all the footage we need for them. I'm going to download the footage onto my computer over the weekend and take it to school next week so the students and can edit it together, using a video projector and my laptop computer with FinalCut Pro on it. I'll have to make some editorial choices about which parts we view together because we have videotaped enormous amounts for each group video project.