IT Video

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Video Create Stage

Mu Ji Hwang

February, 18, 2010

Create

Process Journal

February, 18, 2010

Today my plan was completed and I started my create stage. And in order to start my create stage I first had to gather all the resources required to complete my project, which includes a microphone, a digital camera that can record footage, and a Mac with iMovie preinstalled.

Gather all resources

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And after gathering all of them I just tried each of them out to see if it’d at least turn on and allow me to edit videos. At first glance it seems pretty good. Well I’m out of time now (because I had to finish the rest of the plan today in class and I just checked over the project in overall, which took a considerable amount of time). So next class I’ll start taping and such so that I actually have something to work with.

February 24, 2010

Today we had a substitute teacher and that didn’t matter because I had to tape my video and record the ‘creepy voice’. However it turned out that most of my recording had to be done at home because most of my favorite wireless connectivity tools such as the satellite TV and Xbox weren’t available in school, strangely enough! Hence today I contacted my partner through the Ning messenger tool. And after that I made a small contribution to the wikispace in order to cover my minimum requirements for the class. And today I made a considerable contribution and described the safety of wireless connectivity. So today’s lesson was spent in order to prepare myself to indulge in the create stage ahead of me.

The night of February 24, 2010

Now I need to record the footage required for my video so that I have something to do tomorrow in class. So first I took footage of me abusing the technology at hand, which included me searching the internet for essays to plagiarize and watching very violent movies from a wireless television. And things didn’t go so well according to plan. I planned to make this section last for an approximate of 30 seconds, however it turned out that it only lasted 20 seconds or so. Hence I added another abuse which includes searching the internet with my iPhone, in order to store the information on my phone so that I can use it to cheat in a test. This seemed to do the trick and it appeared to be a very quick fix that helped me to fulfill my plan. But another problem appeared, the text I had written on the phone “WAYS TO CHEAT IN EXAM” did not show as it was on a small screen

Hence in order to solve the problem I wrote the text down on a piece of paper like so. And problem solved!

First Scene

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So now I finished my first few steps. But I think I need to jump ahead and tape the remaining footage right now, instead of recording it after testing the equipment fully, because let’s face it nothing much is going to happen. So I’m going to tape the remaining footage all in one go so that I have some things to work with tomorrow in the double class.

Ok, the next step is now to make the ‘magic/poofing’ to happen. So first I recorded my room with all the digital equipments in place, and the digital equipment with wireless connectivity would include my TV, Laptop, and most importantly my iPhone. And I taped each one of these separately and used close-up shots in order to show maximum effect of the poofing. This went relatively easy however the next step didn’t go so smoothly as I had hoped or planned it. With the laptop and iPhone it was relatively easy to put them away and tape it so that the object appears to be gone, however the TV was a completely different issue. I realized that I had never really cleaned the back of my TV and had an approximate of 7 different AV components plugged in and they would include DVD, Xbox HDTV, Xbox Standard, VCR, Speakers, and many more. This took much longer than I had expected and I’m glad that I did such work at home and in advance because if I didn’t do it early like now I would have had to create a tight schedule where such uncertainties would equal to work being handed in late. Anyways with the time I had it was possible to tape the magic poofing. However I found a very minor mistake; my iPhone was caught in the frame like so, even though it was supposed to have disappeared.

A simple retake fixed the problem.

After the poofing stage I filmed myself carrying a whole stack of books, to illustrate the difficulty of research without the internet (WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY). And now the footage should show me carrying heavy amount of books and falling exhausted at the desk. A little problem happened during this stage as I sort of slipped at the end and knocked my funny bone on the edge of the desk. And it hurt for a pretty long time! Anyways I sucked it up and used the pain as an advantage for my next scene: I had to be depressed about losing wireless connectivity. So I turned off all the lights in my room, except for the bed side lamp, and then moped around for 30 seconds or so. This was a very easy task to do and completed it in 30 seconds.

Now I taped myself jumping around as my technology has come back, I will show that it has come back by reversing the tape I had taped before to show ‘poofing’. Which I reckon will be a very simple task to do. So I’m donefor today and so I finished my taping and all I have to do now is to edit it.

February 25, 2010

Alright so today may not have gone down as smoothly as I had hoped it would. I was relying on the fact that my footage would be able to be read by the computer but apparently it isn’t in the correct format, how inconvenient. So I had to search the wed for a converter which took a considerable amount of time due to the fact that many of them were fake limited trials that converted only the first 20% of the video. And after about 30 minutes of searching and downloading I finally found the right converter. And it’s called the Leawo Free AVI Converter, and it would essentially convert anything to the AVI format, a usable format in iMoie.

This took so much longer than I had expected and the converting time was even more frustrating. Even though the videos were of very short length it was painfully slow due to the fact that the converter, Leawo, was still a free trial version at its best. Hence today I couldn’t really make much progress due to the fact that even though I had my footage, I wasn’t able to see the videos and edit them on iMovie. And I think my plan was a pretty good plan in the sense that I left a lot of time for myself hence even setbacks like these wouldn’t have much of an affect on the liability of the due date.

Upload & Test equipment

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Hence I learned a very painful lesson that I should not presume that everything thing will work itself out because if it didn’t what would I do? (and thank goodness that this time I had made a plan that considered such possibilities!.

March 3, 2010

Today I finally got all my footage onto the iMovie and the Mac. And it turns out that the iMovie has a quite a large amount of unique stuff on it. Such as the voice over, which helped me to record the mwahahahahahah creepy voice in class, due to its noise reduction tool, while not recording the background noise, which is not to say that the mwahahahaha didn’t creep people out.

And after recording the volume I could use the audio adjustments tool to add a fade in and fade out so that the man yelling mwaahahahahahah appears to be slowly disappearing into the air as the voice fades out slowly. I believe that this allowed for a more effective introduction to be created. And without iMovie I don’t think it would have been as quick.

After editing the introduction I had a little fun with the video and the colors schemes. However after experimenting with the Video Adjustments tool for a minute or so I realized that it would not be of much help, maybe except for the depressing scene where I could use this to turn the video black and white = more sad and very scary atmosphere.

Here’s the screenshot of the introduction. And as I explored the iMovie tools I realized that there was a lot more to the iMovie program than I had thought such as the title editor, font editor with numerous styles and options available to it, and a vast variety of sounds and music samples that I could experiment and use in my video at a simple click of a button. (which I found very helpful and interesting). Hence after discovering these tools I started to try them out on my video such as adding transitions between the opening title ‘Wireless Connectivity by Mu Ji H Qatar Academy’ with the introduction, I added the ‘ripple’ effect in order to have a nice and calm introduction. However the more I learnt about this program the more I felt limited because I was so used to working on windows movie maker, an alternate video editing tool, and especially the timeline feature of windows movie maker. And it got very difficult and frustrating when I wanted to add voice and music and transitions and I couldn’t see what I was doing. Hence I decided that I’m going to use similar effects as those I have found today on iMovie however use Windows Movie Maker to make the short video.

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March 4, 2010

Using the windows movie make I found it much easier to organize and add audio and such. Like on the screen shot below it was easy to organize the audio and video. This made it much easier for me to edit my video because I could visually see what would happen and what music would overlap with which video.

Another thing that I found useful was the zoom feature; with the zoom feature I could look closer at the timeline and edit the video more specifically and to the right second.

There was a minor problem while making this video, I couldn’t take the video I created in iMovie and put it into the windows movie maker. Hence I solved this problem by just redoing the editing, which was a very annoyning process as I had already finished a big chunk of my video.

After redoing my introduction I used the following features to edit my video a little further.

I used the transtion effect in order to make the video feel a lot smoother and well balanced. This was easy to do as all I had to do was choose the effect I wanted and just drag it to the timeline. However this proposed a problem, when I added the transitions the videos got shorter as the transition required them to be played simultaneously. This made the overall video time much shorter and even below the expected requriment of 2 minutes. Hence I proposed to solve this problem by first adding various text slides, this was easy to do as there was a whole list of lettering I could do such as adding titles at the beginning and adding text ontop of the video. And so my video turned into an old movie where the actions/acting are followed by lines of text, in order to explain to the audience what exactly happened.

Investigation - Wireless Connectivity

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

10 flatteners helped to flatten the world.

Globalisation

Outsourcing

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

Skills & Change

Introduction

I'm looking forward to working with you!

Investigation - Slides

Here's my power point:

Flat Classroom Project

View more presentations from hmj94.

Investigation - General Investigation

The flat classroom project is based on Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century'.

The flat classroom project aims to 'flatten or lower the classroom walls', in other words help students connect with students of different countries and experiences. We will achieve this by creating a video/digital artifacts of our chosen topics and then display them on the global wikispace for international judging and comparison. To create these digital artifacts we will be using the best source of information, the wikispace and the previous works of other students. However a vast majority of the information will be research based as well as personal opinion based, for example for wireless connectivity I could include my personal use of iPhones and wireless internet while backing it up with statistics found through research.

The design cycle is the key to successfully completing this project because the design cycle gives us guidelines and requirements, that we can set ourselves, and steps that we must follow to achieve our specific goal. The first step of the design cycle is to investigate, a very logical step because if we do not know what we were trying to create how could we create? Second if we don't design our product and try different methods of approaching the solution how could we get the best possible solution? (in our case the most educational video) If we don't plan how can we manage ourselves in order to set deadlines and know when our project will be completed and how much work we would have to accomplish in the chosen timeline. If we don't create how can we solve any of our world's problems. And finally if we don't evaluate and reflect on what we did right and what we did 'bad' on how can we improve ourselves and make a brighter and better future? Hence the design cycle is the key to successfully completing this project.

It is very important that we develop new and more efficient work skills because the world is not what it used to be. Knowledge has become power and time has become money, hence without these new technologies and ways to apply them into real world situations we would become obsolete and unable to compete in the flat global market.

The creators of the flat classroom project are Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. I do not know who Ms. Davis is however Ms. Lindsay was a teacher at Qatar Academy and I experienced her commitment towards the project as she brought the flat classroom project to Qatar Academy in 2009.

The world 'flatteners' identified by Friedman includes the following:

Flattener #1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. This was a significant event and the beginning of the new era where communism has ended and individuals were given choices and more freedom. And Friedman states that with the fall of communism the PCs appealed to those individuals who wanted to create their own information and share/connect with each other. So flattener #1 was the most basic and fundamental step of the 'flat classroom project'. The collapse is also significant to the project because without the event we would have never developed (or rather much much later in time) a more user friendly internet where freedom is practiced and widely spread.

Flattener #2: Netscape. Flattener #2 changed the internet from something professionals and educated people could use to something everyone, no matter the age (from babies to grandpas), can use. The easier accessibility then led to the ability to manipulate word documents, music, videos, pictures, and many other everyday files on the digital computer screen.

Flattener #3: Workflow Software. Flattener #3 is when the computers and machines became able to communicate with other machines with no human contact and when this began the need for standard language became important, hence HTML and SMTP were created so that any data could be opened by any computer through the interenet.

Flattener #4: Open Source. Flattener #4 is people contributing to a bigger organization and works from around the globe, the best examples would be Wikipedia or our project 'The Flatclassroom Project'.

Flattener #5: Outsourcing. Outsourcing is when parts and big components of the companies are spread around the country and different services are concentrated in difffernet places. For example most of the servicing parts of the companies are spread around the cities and concentration of people however the manufacturing factory may be further away from cities as it is not (generally) environmentally friendly. And Friedman believes that this spreading of digital companies has created a far more efficient digital world as well as a cost efficient world.

Flattener #6: Offshoring. Flattener #6, as you know offshoring is when parts of the companies are moved to different parts of the globe for lower production and operation cost which results in more profit for the company. The biggest and well known company for offshoring is China. And now many countries are competting with each other for more business and more economic development as many of these countries who are available/famous for offshoring are in need of profit and money.

Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining. Friedman believes that retail shops like Walmart are best companies and shops to use technology to supply themselves, record sales, and keep track of the shipping orders to different parts of America.

Flattener #8: Insourcing. Is when different companies work for each other. For example a computer producing company may be the ones to produce and manufacture them however another company may be responsible for the maintenance and reparing the warrantied computers. We are also going to be applying this 'flattener' to make our lives much easier.

Flattener #9: In-forming. Flattener #9 refers to search engines where people can find so much information at the flick of your fingers.

Flattener #10: The Steroids. The Steroids refers to the personal appliances which includes your iPhone, iPods, Mobiles, hand held PCs, smarphones. They are called the steroids because they can process digital medias from music to videos to word documents and it can all be done in a matter of seconds hence our personal appliances may be one of the most powerful devices and flattener in our world.

We will create a video based on one of these topics:1. Connecting the World Online (CWO) 2. World Wide Web(WWW) 3. Work Flow Software(WFS) 4. Uploading: The Changing Shape of Information (CSI) 5. Web 2.0 (W20) 6. Globalization and Outsourcing (G&O) 7. Google (GGL) 8. PLEs and Social Networking (PLE&SN) 9. Mobiles and Ubiquitous (M&U) 10. Virtual Communication(VCom) 11. Wireless Connectivity (WCon). And our videos will help to demonstrate the practical use and importance of these topics to the people who are yet unaware of its effectiveness and efficientness.

While we try to create these videos we will be keeping to the rules of digital citizenship. These include: digital access (ability to use the internet and various other 'digital' items), digital commerce (purchasing from sites such as eBay), digital communication (ability to give and take information using the internet), digital literacy (ability to know when to use certain programs and applications), digital etiquette (manners while talking and sending information to others), digital law (legal consequences), digital rights and responsibilities (privileges that must be respected and know its extent), digital health and wellness (keeping your physical and mental health at a healthy level), and digital security (keeping your private information such as credit card number and such safe).

We will be working and collaborating with various students from both our real world environment as well as students from the online environment to create these educational videos.

For the first term of 2010, the flat classroom project will be completed around the end of February and the awards will be given in March.

By contributing and taking an active part of the project we can learn many essential skills which can and will help us provide a better future for ourselves as well as the global community. By taking part we learn the essential skills of outsourcing and digital communication, the digital etiquette and the manners we must keep while using the internet, and finally allow us to face realistic projects where dead lines and responsibilities and consequences are more coherent and clear.