CETL Video Pedagogy Workshop

Posted on November 7, 2016 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan

  • Three Reasons for Teaching Video (6 minutes)
  • Some Nuts and Bolts for Teaching Video (20 minutes)
  • Workshop #1: Working with Still Images (20 minutes)
  • Workshop #2: Editing Video (15 minutes)
  • Saving, Publishing, and Sharing Video (5 minutes)
  • Some Assignments and Projects (10 minutes)
  • Assessing Digital Projects (5 minutes)
  • Some Helpful Resources

Getting Started

Later in the presentation, I will show how to import and work with image and audio files in Moviemaker. If you want to follow along, then you should download this .zip file and save it to your desktop.

Introduction: Three Reasons for Teaching Video [11:30-11:36]

As a theorist, I teach video to introduce students to dense, theoretical concepts, such as OOO (Harman, Bogost), New Materialism (Bennett, Rickert), Posthumanism (Haraway, Hayles), or ANT (Latour, Law). I would suggest that these different theories all challenge commonplace notions of autonomous agency and the traditional prioritization of the human/subject. Filming video from behind the camera allows students to perceive these theoretical postulates by highlighting the importance of space and context. Here I am thinking particularly of Rickert’s work on ambience and rhetoric:

We can say that rhetoric persuades as long as we understand this to invoke less a subjective change of mind or emotional state than a transformation in our worldly situation. […] rhetoric constructed from an ambient perspective cannot simply dissolve the subject/object and human/world binaries without taking the necessary next step of acknowledging that rhetoric’s work is distributed and ecological and wholly incorporating that idea into rhetorical theory. Rhetoric is not solely human doing, as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and other theorists help demonstrate. Nonhuman elements and forces are always in play as a part of human doing, making, and saying. The accomplishments of rhetorical practice are entwined with (re)organizations of the world.

Multimodal dimensions of video can better attune students to the affective/ambient dimensions of spaces/encounters. From behind the camera, students are more likely to attune themselves to these entanglements, to record the ambient and nonhuman actants that shape human behavior. (Ong–writing abstracts, pulls things out of context. Film, less so).

As teacher, I teach video to leverage students’ innate familiarity with video. Put simply, many of our students watch more than they read. They have developed sophisticated, but often unconscious, understanding of the mechanics and syntax of video. This is *not* to say they are “digital natives.” They don’t necessarily know how to use complicated technology and/or software. But I do believe we can take advantage of their unconscious knowledge of how video should work, their genre awareness, to teach advanced rhetorical concepts (many of which they struggle to recognize in print).

I had the good fortune as a graduate student of meeting Cynthia Selfe, just as I was starting my research into new media pedagogy, and asked her how she justified teaching photoshop, web design, video production, and other multimedia in English classes (a question that I was asked quite often in 2004). Her reply echoed Aristotle: “It is my obligation to teach them how to express themselves through all available means.”

As a rhetorician, I teach video very much in light of Selfe’s response. It is my obligation to teach students how to best participate in civic discourse. This means teaching them how to compose in the genres and mediums that dominate our contemporary civic sphere (and to suggest ways they might develop new genres).

Some Nuts and Bolts for Teaching Video [11:36-11:56]

First, there’s some equipment issues to deal with:

  • Make sure you know what computer labs have what software (MovieMaker, iMovie, Adobe Premiere). Generally, I do my first video project in MovieMaker because it is so easy to use and I know virtually every student has access to it (it is included in every copy of Windows).
  • What I put in my syllabus (part 1): This course requires access to a digital recording device. A smart phone capable of recording digital video is sufficient. Note that, if you do not have a smart phone, the UNC library will loan video equipment.
  • What I put in my syllabus (part 2): You will also need to purchase a tripod for your recording device. These generally run from $8-20. Note that the UNC library also rents tripods for smart phones.
  • What I say in class (part 3): I am neither a film scholar, a video producer, or a technology expert. As a rhetorician, my expertise concerns hypothesizing how different audiences might receive different messages, and maximizing the communicative potential of a message to best change the actions of those audiences. As a compositionist, I am an expert in developing heuristics, researching genres, and engendering reflective processes that will help you compose more effective texts. Our work with video is part of an experiment to see how we can transform the composing methods developed for print into new forms of media. How can we “write” video? How much of our knowledge and pedagogy regarding written composition and rhetoric translates into a digital realm?

Second, there’s a pretty consistent set of readings and videos I use to familiarize students with the elements of shooting video:

Finally, when working with video, it is extremely important to stress file saving and storage. While programs like MovieMaker claim to “import” files, they are actually only creating paths to other media. This means that when you save a movie file, you are saving paths to other files. If you then move the movie file, you have invalidated all the paths (the dreaded Microsoft Red X’s of death). In plainer language, you’ve lost your whole movie.

This is especially an issue for students working in computer labs and saving files on a flash drive. The easiest way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to create a folder when you start a movie project and save all image, audio, and video files in the movie in that folder. That way, all the files move at once.

Workshop #1: Working with Still Video [11:56-12:16]

Normally when I do this type of presentation, I introduce students to video by having them make a video from still pictures. This allows me to introduce the features/functions in editing software before we begin to work with actual video.

Again, if you want to follow along, then you should download this file and unzip the contents.

Here’s a link to the tutorial I use in a shorter class session. The tutorial uses still images and pre-recorded audio, limiting the amount of downtime. It is meant to introduce students to importing files, using timeline and transition tools, layering audio files, and exporting files (file types, compression, etc). I often follow this activity up by asking them to make a music video for a song, or animating a news article (read and record the article to images).

Workshop #2: Editing Digital Video [12:16-12:31]

It is also possible to work with video projects in a workshop. Here are some scripts I located via BPPlayhouse’s Acting Scene’s database.

Working in groups of three, I would like you to shoot a short video. I have packets with two person dialogue scenes (your choice of American Beauty, Back to the Future, Dirty Dancing, or Pulp Fiction). You should shoot your dialogue 3 times, from different angles. After shooting, we will upload your videos and edit them in MovieMaker.

Your videos should take into account the conventions mentioned above. Let’s briefly cover some of the conventions mentioned above:

  • Video’s should be shot in identifiable shots, starting with a wide establishing shot, moving to a mid shot, and then a close up shot, before concluding with a mid/wide shot. Shoot your dialogue from 3 different angles.
  • Video’s should frame shots according to the rule of thirds.

After you have shot your videos, come on back and we will upload them into the computer. This should take about 3-5 minutes, depending on the length of your clips.

Note that what takes much longer is “rendering” or compressing video. When working with longer high-definition projects, rendering with Adobe can take up to 3 hours. Last night I made a short, sample movie with iMovie as a refresher. While the movie is only 1:20, it took almost 4 minutes to render, and then another 8 minutes to upload to Google Drive so I could share it (that’s over my home’s Internet wi-fi). Make sure students anticipate long rendering and transfer times when working on projects and negotiating deadlines.

Editing Some Video

Step One: Populating the timeline.

Step Two: Trimming clips.

Step Three: Adding a title screen.

Step Four: Making a still image, adjusting image time.

Step Five: Adjusting Volume.

Step Six: Transitions.

Step Seven: Adding Background music.

Saving, Publishing, and Sharing Video [12:31-12:41]

We’ve already talked about the importance of saving video projects in a folder. Now I want to talk a bit about file types and saving video.

When you are working in an editing software like Moviemaker or iMovie, the file you save will be a “raw,” working file (the .wlmp in Moviemaker). When you *publish/export* your movie, you will need to select a file type (called codecs). While there are a lot of choices, I recommend MP4, if only because it is the most widely supported file type.

If you are planning on working with video projects, then you should plan ahead for how you will receive the projects. As I said above, file sizes for video files can be very large (in the multiple GB). One possibility is to share the work publicly via YouTube, Vimeo, or another video sharing site.

  • YouTube; Vimeo
  • Dropbox
    • Pros: Private, Freemium, Relatively easy to use
    • Cons: Limited server space (so it is temporary storage at best)
  • Zip and Email
    • Pros: Private, Free, Relatively easy to use
    • Cons: Email clients (e.g., gmail) increasingly limit file uploads to 25mb, .zip files can be disorienting to some less tech-savvy students
  • CD-Rom
    • Pros: Private, Virtually unlimited file size
    • Cons: Increasingly, laptops no longer come with CD-R/DVD-R drives, CD-Roms cost money
  • Google Drive / One Drive
    • Pros:Free. Private. Efficient
    • Cons: You only get 15gb of free storage space. That can fill quickly.

Here is a link to some documentation on using student One Drive accounts.

Assignments and Projects [12:41-12:51]

Key resource: the PechaKucha presentation format. 20 slides x 20 seconds a slide.

I have published on something called the Kalman Project, inspired by multimodal artist Maira Kalman. Here’s an example by a Jaclyn Diaz.

Here’s a link to the course description for an Advanced Creative Nonfiction course I am teaching next semester. The course is composed of 4 video projects and stresses the importance of reflection.

And here is the proposed syllabus for a new course in the English writing Minor called Professional Writing and/as Digital Video.

Assessing Digital Projects

Yesterday, someone asked about how I deal with assessing these projects. I wrote an article that addresses how we handle student anxiety toward non-traditional projects!

The short answer is to involve students in generating the rubric for the project.

Helpful Resources

The links below are resources that I often use while teaching video. Please feel free to email me if you have questions, or would like for me to come and give a tutorial for your class. I am more than willing to work with you to figure out what you want students to make and give a tutorial on how to make it.

  • Creative Commons (both for images and music)
  • Audacity: a free OS agnostic audio editor
  • Photoscape: a free image editing program for Windows
  • paint.NET: a free and more robust image editing software for PC
  • Seashore: a free, user-friendly image editing program for Mac
  • GIMP: a free, agnostic, professional quality image-editing software (high power, high learning curve–similar to Photoshop)

Further Reading

Here’s a few readings I recommend sharing with students if they(you) have questions about teaching multimodal composition.

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