Final Films!

We are screening today at 11:30. Finally, the fruits of all of our hard work:

You can find the final projects here:



http://www.vimeo.com/groups/42618/videos

What I need:

I need to start collecting the Informed Consent and Documentary Release forms for all of your interviewees. I'm assembling them as part of our archive, and I need one for each interview. If you don't have them, you will need to get them. I would like these no later than Wednesday of next week.

Landry/Wu: St. Joseph's Altars Rough Cut

Here is the first rough cut to come in:

St. Joseph's Altars Rough Cut (Landry/Wu) from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

Uploading to Vimeo

Just a reminder about your rough cut:

Be sure to see the previous email about Vimeo, and sign up / "contact add" me.

*** I want you to upload your rough cut by Friday MORNING EARLY so we can watch it in class. We will meet in our regular room as the lab is unavailable. ***
NOTE: Vimeo can take an hour or two to process your video when you upload it before it is ready to view. Keep this in mind!

To prepare your movie to upload to Vimeo, you need to use the "Share" tab in iMovie.

do this:

SHARE --> EXPORT USING QUICKTIME

A dialog box will pop up. Make sure you are saving your movie to your portable hard drive. iMovie often defaults to the main drive.

Click on OPTIONS

Compression will read "H.264" which is what you want for uploading to Vimeo

Dimensions should read "1280x768" (or smaller in any 16:9 ratio). You can change this by clicking on SIZE in the options dialog box.

Your file will need to be smaller than 500 MB when it is processed, because you cannot upload a file larger than 500 MB for free.

If it ends up being larger than 500 MB, you will have to process it to Quicktime again, only at a lower resolution (Try NTSC 720 x 480).

Follow the instructions on Vimeo to upload this movie file. It is no more difficult than uploading something to Facebook.

Email me the link to your movie when it is done uploading.

Using iMovie to create your rough cut

At this point, you should have your portable hard drive with your interviews and perhaps even a few useful still images. Now it is time to start the editing process.

We are going to use iMovie for this class. This is a very easy-to-use video editing program on the Mac.

The first thing you are going to need to do in iMovie is set up your PROJECT.

It is important that you set up your PROJECT on your portable hard drive. To make sure you do this, follow the following steps.

1.) Make sure your hard drive is plugged in!
2.) look in the upper left-hand corner of iMovie, and you will see a button called Project Library - click on that.
3.) Here you will see all of the drives on the computer and the various projects that they have on them.
4.) Scroll down to your portable drive and click on it. It should highlight in blue.
5.) Right click (Option-click) on the drive and you will see a selection for "New Project..." - click on that.
6.) Name your project. Make sure the Widescreen (16:9) option is selected and the


Give your project a name, and make sure the Widescreen (16:9) setting is selected and the "Automatically add:" box is UNCHECKED

You have now successfully created your project on your portable hard drive.

NOW you need to add your films to iMovie in an "EVENT" but you are NOT going to do this by using the FILE --> NEW EVENT command.

Instead, do the following:

1.) To create a new event, go to FILE --> IMPORT --> MOVIES
2.) It is very important that you fill out this dialog box correctly:

A) Make sure the "save to:" drop-down box has your hard drive selected.
B) Make sure you are not adding to an existing event (unless you mean to do so.) If you have not yet imported your movies into iMovie, you want to create a new event.
C) Name your event
D) if your files are in the .mov format (Quicktime) - all files that are from me will be in Quicktime .mov format - you can deselect the "optimize video" file. If you have any other format - from the Flip for instance - you will need to check "optimize video" and make sure Full Size is selected. This will take longer.
E) When you import the files, select "move" instead of "copy" files. This will move the file into your iMovie Event Folder.

3.) Once you have imported all of your films into your event, you are ready to watch them and make editing choices.

Making Your Rough Cut

Your Rough Cut
Due date: Friday, April 16

Now that it is April, it is time for us to transition from filming our interviews to editing our footage. The first and most crucial step in this process is for you to spend a lot of time looking at your interviews and cutting and arranging your footage into a logical and easily-followed story that is of five to seven minutes in length.

The technology that we use is not all that sophisticated. We will be using Apple's iMovie, which is a simple program that I will be showing you how to use in class.

The REAL challenge here is

1.) Deciding which topical thread(s) you will follow in your interview(s)
2.) Identifying and cutting usable sections of your interview(s) into a logical and compact narrative.

Don't worry about transitions, still images, text, or special effects right now. What we HEAR in the rough cut is far more important than what we SEE. Though we are using video software, we are working primarily on the audio track of your documentary. Text, images, etc, go in AFTER we have a working rough cut that tells us a story!

Look at the example of Sam and Devon's interview at the Hare Krishna temple. Please watch this short three-minute unedited segment. Then play the 1:20 length edited cut. The editing choices that you make will be different, so I produce this example only to show the sorts of cuts you might make. Pay attention to your ability to put things in different sequence than they occurred during the interview!

Unedited Video - Student sample from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

And the edited version:

Edited video - student sample from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

And finally, I threw in a few transitions in one more version. Note that this video moves too quickly. Pauses in the narration where one might show images, etc, would definitely work. We'll look at all these things in the coming month!

Student Sample - with transitions from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

On the eve of spring break...

By my count, the class has thus far gathered 17 different interviews. Some are more useful and longer than others. Some are very remarkable! We have more to do, but we are definitely starting to build an impressive oral history archive.