Movie Making, the next step...

A new week and a fresh start to editing our creation! Tamar and I were confident and ready to finish it. We were clear where we were going next and what needed to be done. The images were edited and synched how we wanted and it was time to organise our many sound clips. Our clips, which were all recorded in Audacity, needed to be converted into MP3 format, saved then imported into WMM (windows Movie maker) where we could then edit more, if required and organise where they were to appear in our movie. Reading this back there seems to be so many extra steps! Why does everything need to be converted by different tools? There must be a simpler or more efficient way to do this. If anyone knows of a different or better way to do this I would be interested to hear. We followed the steps making sure to save as we went but for some reason, which I have failed to work out, we lost our work about 4 times. Each separate occasion occurred later on in the process, which meant we had more to lose. We wondered if we were asking the computer to carry out too much at once?   

Once our sound clips were added, the transitions set and the captions written we nervously watched the movie. Something was not right, it was lacking something and seemed a bit dull. We decided to have some backing music running throughout, so there were no gaps in sound. We found a track and thought it would be easy to add in but WMM only allows for two levels of sound. We had muted the sound from the camera as it was just background noise and had imported in all the speech, so we had used the two options. Feeling frustrated  we decided to play the movie out loud into a microphone while recording using audacity. We used Fetchmp3 to convert our backing track and import to audacity. Once we were happy with the levels we combined the tracks into one, converted, saved and imported it back into WMM.

THE FINISHED ARTICLE HOORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

Although this has been a frustrating experience, on reflection I am glad it didn't go smoothly. I feel I have learnt a huge amount of technical skills and realise that yes, ICT doesn't always go to plan, but the important part to take from that is to accept it may not work, find a solution or alternative and move forward. Problem solving.

In the primary classroom I still stick to the decision that this level of movie making should be kept to the upper stages as long as they have had previous experiences to build on or step by step instruction. I do feel it would be a positive experience for children to go that step further from just capturing images to creating a movie, but it doesn't have to be taken quite to the same level as we did unless the  children are ready.