iMovie Madness

It’s been a week so I’ve had significant time to reflect on my iMovie experience. I would have to admit that I really enjoyed this project. The program was incredibly easy to use, but incredibly hard to save. But, when a person is working with files that large—how could it be easy to save!

Let me evaluate the process…

One factor that I didn’t fully take into consideration was the preparation and design that it takes to create a movie. Sure it was easy, and fun, for me to go out and take some footage, but putting it all together in a coherent and effective manor took me by surprise.

To be honest, I started off doing an iMovie about technology. This was a movie in which I was examining the life of my roommate and myself. In this scenario I was going to utilize all forms of technology and compare this to my roommate’s lack of tech savvy. This film was extremely interesting (and funny!), but my roommate couldn’t do any more filming, so I was unable to collect all of the necessary footage. I was disappointed because I was fond of the way that this movie was turning out. At that point, I was actually doing the work in Windows Movie Maker. But after my roommate could no longer act in this blockbuster and I realized that this may be the only time that I get to learn a program such as iMovie, I decided that I would start over and use the Apple program instead.

It was becoming very stressful (almost as stressful as this Cortland Downtown Project; yeah right) trying to think of a new storyline to film. Since it was only Lily and I, things just fell into place. My girlfriend’s brother really liked the idea that I had a hedgehog, and asked a tremendous amount of questions every time they were on the phone. At this point I realized that there would be no better way for me to teach him about hedgehogs then making a movie. Hmmm… this could be handy somewhere else.

So, after I had my idea on hand, I started filming. I shot about 30 minutes of live, un-cut, raw footage. That was the easy part…

It was after I brought all of the footage into the library that I recognized that I was not going to be able to just slop this thing together. I needed a plan. I had no plan. After futzing around with the program and footage for a while it become evident that I needed to re-strategize.

I took out a blank piece of paper (actually I forgot paper so I stole one from the printer in the library, breaking it in the process. Shh… don’t tell) and started to make a storyboard (or at least my crappy version of one). I organized my clips and ideas into a more rational timeline, and recorded my voice using a manipulator technique available in Audacity. Now I was ready to go. After about six or seven hours in the library I was complete, I just needed to export it. Little did I realize that it was going to take an additional hour, or so, for me to compress this file (cutting it a little close aren’t you, Ray).

After I took it home and viewed the final product I was very pleased.

But, after viewing it, I do have a couple of disappointments…

First off, I wish that the sound of my manipulated voice was louder. I don’t get why it was so soft. When it was in iMovie I increased the volume of the voice clips to 150%; I even decreased the rest of the audio to make sure that it was loud enough. Before I compressed the file the sound was audible; I don’t know what happened.

Secondly, I would have liked to have been able to work on this project in more than just one setting. Because the files were so large when I was working on the movie, it was next to impossible for me to save. They were so large that they wouldn’t even fit on my 4.7GB DVDRW that I had purchased. Because of this, I was forced to do it all in one go around. It would have been nice if I would have thought to borrow my friend’s portable hard drive; that would have made things a hell of a lot easier.

I think the rubric that Dr. Stearns posted was a quality general rubric. I just hope that both professors understand all of the work that goes into making one of these movies (I’m sure they do).

I must say that the other videos we watched in class were phenomenal! Cloning, horror, students and waterfalls! Congratulations to us! Those videos were extraordinary. Cheers.