TEACHING IDEAS – DMAC "Concept in 60" videos

AmyDamianDMAC2011

Damian Doyle and I attended this summer’s Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) at Ohio State University, where we got to play around with lots of digital tools and toys. We also read a variety of articles on the pedagogy and practice of digital composition, some of which I plan to share here soon. Damian has headed off for adventures in Ireland and elsewhere, so he’ll share his reflections on DMAC later. I’m now back in Colorado and trying to catch up wit my online class, not to mention lots of housework.

One of our first assignments was to make a “Concept in 60 Seconds” video that explained the concept of multimodality using asynchronous audio and video. (“Asynchronous” is my word for it. Not sure if it’s appropriate, but the idea is that the video track couldn’t be in sync with the audio track.)

Most participants used the Flip camcorders provided for us to capture both audio and video, and then they edited the footage in iMovie, with some audio adjustments in Audacity as needed. We had about two days to make these, as they were designed to be practice exercises, and then the final products were shown at a cookout at one of the DMAC leaders’ homes, which was a lot of fun.

Here’s Damian’s video, which explores a concept he’s very interested in and will hopefully explore further through digital compositions.

And here’s mine. I already knew how to capture and edit video and audio, so I took a slightly different route of grabbing copyright-free content from Archive.org and “remixing” it to convey a message about the multiple modes of gender.

Multimodality of Gender from Amy Goodloe on Vimeo.

The video and audio clips mostly come from old movies, including some hilarious old educational movies for women, as well as a few old commercials. I used Stickies on my Mac to plan out my “storyboard” for the video, keeping notes on separate stickies for each of the modes I wanted to cover. To make the “girly” writing and “guy” writing, I used SnapzPro to record myself typing the messages in different fonts, at different speeds, then I used iMovie’s “picture within picture” option to embed the “guy” writing into the “girly” writing clip.

Because I had a particular look I wanted for the titles that present each mode, I didn’t use iMovie’s Title feature. Instead, I made the title cards in Pixelmator (a much cheaper but very powerful alternative to Photoshop), using a blending technique to get the “grunge” effect and saving them as transparent PNG files, which I then added to the video clips using iMovie’s “cutaway” option.

The most challenging part of the project was capturing everything I wanted to capture in only 60 seconds. My first draft was a little over two minutes, so I had to spend a lot of time cutting and then shaving off seconds here and there. I also sped up a few clips, possibly a bit too much. By the end of the editing process, I was amazed at how “slow” a 5 second clip seemed to be, as most of them were only 2 or 3 seconds. Interesting insight into the modern attention span!

I’ve enjoyed seeing lots of remixes at conferences and in the JUMP journal, but I’d never made one. I’d never even tried layering audio and video content before, or working under such tight time constraints. So I learned a lot in the process! I now have all new appreciate for one of my favorite JUMP pieces: Wanna Be Starting Something

Tools used: iMovie ’09, GarageBand ’09, QuickTime X (for trimming), FLVCrunch (to extract MP3’s out of videos), SnapzPro (screen recording), Pixelmator, and Stickies. (I was using a MacBook, but it’s worth noting that these same kinds of tools are available for Windows PCs.)