Every spring we have a night for the upcoming 8th graders. At this time, you need to put on a good show to recruit new students for your classes. I have tried a number of things, other students, green screens, interviewing people, but there is a lot of competition from other programs. Last year I decided to try something new. I usually have videos of student work playing, but that isn’t enough. So I decided to make a promotional video, one that was aimed directly at the students. I was thinking if they saw students having fun in my class, this might convince a few students to take my class. The problem is that by this time of the year, we are into full swing and all of my classes are doing production. I have had students make recruiting videos before but have been disappointed with the results. Although their videos are highly entertaining, they are seldom useful. Unless the 8th graders believed that ninjas would attack them if they didn’t sign up, I was going to need to make this video.
One day I took my students to the cafeteria so they could spread out and record commercials. This would be perfect day to record the students, if they were not using all of the cameras. I pulled my phone and began taking pictures thinking I might could use them for my website. After a few pictures I got the idea to shoot video. I had not been a big fan of cell phone video. However, it worked great and I quickly had a variety of shots.
About a week earlier, I had purchased iMovie for my phone. Although, I had no plans to use it for anything serious when I bought it, I decided to experiment with editing with it. I used iMovie on a desktop for a long time. It was a great program to teach students the basics of editing. Finally, I moved on to Final Cut Pro. Because I was training my students for careers in the broadcasting industry, I needed to use professional tools. However, I was quickly able to edit a 30 second promo for my class on a $5 phone app.
Here is the final product.
http://youtu.be/ki_exeaCQNs
Not too long after finishing the video, Apple released an update to iMovie which included several templates. I put together few more videos using the templates which I showed for the 8th grade night. Using the templates has some limitations, but it is a great starting point for beginner students.
In video production, we discuss workflow. This is the process of taking video from your camera, and transferring to your computer. Once in the computer, you can transfer the video into a variety of programs to edit, adjust audio and color and output to DVD and the web. It doesn’t seem like we are that far off from doing the entire process all on an iPhone.