Digital Storytelling

I looked at iMovie once before and was almost immediately overwhelmed by the look of it and quickly gave up.  I was so nervous when I found out I had to try again.  I was thankful for the quick overview we were given and thankful that my group had put in a good deal of "pre-work" before the start of class.  I am not sure how well this would have gone if we were starting from scratch.  I think the group setting helped me to simply dive in both because I had a little cheering squad behind me but also because I had anxious team members who wanted their turn to get their part done behind me.

I was also grateful for the "happy accidents" that we had while making our movie.  We learned how to make a sound clip fade out when one team member tried to move a clip but ended up adjusting the sound instead.  I never thought I would be so excited to hear something so simple.    There were a few other things that my group members did that I would never have thought to do, like use video and then speed up that video to make it look awesome.  I was shocked to see how quickly we made this video.  I know we only made a 3-minute video and it took us 2 hours but it went by so quickly. It was not a stressed out 2 hours, it was a fun exploration of all the amazing tools we found. I could not believe it was so easy to "drag and drop" photos, videos, music, sound effects.   I can see how one could get lost down the rabbit hole pretty quick but as long as I am not stressed while doing it, I consider it a success.

I had a plan for a lesson on book trailers a few years back using iMovie and scraped it when I couldn't figure out how to use iMovie but I am thinking that it might be time to pull that lesson plan back out.  I do like that there are other resources that can be used (Animoto, Wevideo, StupeFlix) and I am glad that I am pretty confident on most of these because of these assignments.

I do remember telling the teacher librarian at my school that she should make a video of her library orientation so that she didn't have to do it 18 times in one week.  We had always said we would but never did and now it is looking more like we could do this.  We might just pull it off this year.  I also like that we could put the video on our website for students and/or parents to refer to it when needed.