Today’s Plan:
- Schedule Update
- Creating a Multimedia Presentation
- Return of the Rubric
- Homework
Schedule Update
I made a few changes:
- Monday, Nov 12th: Return of the Rubric
- Wednesday, Nov 14th: Creating a multimedia presentation and MLA/APA citation
- Friday, Nov 16th: Complete academic research paper due in class for peer review Ross Computer Computer Lab
- Monday, Nov 19th: Optional class. Complete drafts of final paper due to me by Tuesday, Nov 20th at midnight
- Monday, Nov 26th Review: creating a multimedia presentation
- Wednesday, Nov 28th: Presentations #1-10
- Friday, Nov 30th: Presentations #11-20
- Monday Dec 3rd – Friday Dec 7th: Office hours availability to discuss revisions. Final papers are due Friday Dec 7th at 11:00am
I’ve set up a portal in Canvas for you to submit the draft of your final paper we will peer review in Friday’s class (Rough Draft, Due Friday Nov 17th and Tuesday Nov 20th). This is also the link that I will use to assess your paper over Thanksgiving Break. You’ll get 1 point if the draft is there Friday morning, the other four points will be the result of my draft assessment.
Creating a Multimedia Presentation
Remember that our last two classes of the semester–Wednesday Nov 28th and Friday Nov 30th–will be dedicated to watching multimedia remediations of your papers.
In terms of length, your final papers should be 1700-2000 words (excluding the title page and the works cited/reference list). Your presentations need to be much more concise; I want the videos to be 60-75 seconds. That means you get 125-150 words. Those words need to compress your argument, evidence, and recommendations/conclusions. This type of compression is quite difficult!
In terms of genre, I expect your video to be a modified PechaKucha, a popular presentation format that uses 20 images for 20 seconds each. We’ll look at an example of a PechaKucha on Wednesday. Here’s our modification: I want you to use images for 5 seconds each. 20 seconds is too long to leave anything on a screen. So, if you do a 60 second speech, that’s 12 images. 75 seconds would be 15 images.
In terms of technology, I recommend using a free, open-source software called OpenShot to put these videos together. If you have an older PC, you might have Windows Moviemaker–that’s an incredibly easy software to use. If you have a Mac, then you have iMovie (note that iMovie is also available for iOS). Don’t use PowerPoint to do this–there’s much better technologies that are easier to use.
Besides arranging images and setting their length to 5 seconds, you’ll need to record yourself reading your script. If you have an iPhone, then you have an App called Voice Memos. This app produces a pretty high quality recording that you can email to yourself and then import into your project.
So, multimedia presentation requirements:
- 125-150 word script
- 12-15 images on screen for 5 seconds each
- Quality audio recording of your speech (note: double and triple check volume levels)
- Title text on screen
- Bonus: background music
IMPORTANT NOTE ON SAVING PROJECTS IN ANY VIDEO EDITOR: Finally, when working with video, it is extremely important to stress file saving and storage. While programs like OpenShot or 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.
When you are done with your video and want to submit it, then you need to export the video.. There’s a lot of file formats you can use to save a video. I recommend .mp4 because it is a universal file type. If you use Moviemaker, then it will export as an .wmv. That’s fine too. Just make sure you don’t try to share or submit the project file to Canvas–that file only works in a video editor (and, again, only if it is still connected to all the files that were used to make the video).
Return of the Rubric
I feel like it has been awhile since we’ve spent time with our class rubric. Since you are in the process of drafting your final papers, I thought it might be time to assess a few papers from previous semesters.
Homework
Let’s look at this helpful image from ToothPaste for Dinner that describes the writing process.
Get crying people.
