Video Project Report : episode1

Video Sentences

Video Sentences

This project is the video capture representing ideas and thoughts by using video composition.

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Final Project: Voice of New Comers

The project that I am planning to do is the live journal composition. I have been here as a new international student, I have been through a big transition in life, especially in academic aspect. I plan to convey the experience in studying, comparing expectation and reality. In addition I will include other experience from other students whom similar to mine. The main media that I focus is voice narration by using audio recorder. Each caption will represent each paragraph of composition. Illustration will be cooperated by images and music sound will be added as the background to represent mood of each paragraph. I have found that www.freeplaymusic.com is my place to go for music files.

Presentation of the video will be mainly by voice recording. I am trying not to include my face caption video because I think that facial expression would distract audience attention from the message I am speaking. The main massage and meaning will be in the voices. The position of the video project is somewhere between traditional presentation and new media.

Primary production will start from alphabetic texts in form of composition. It will be started from draft and been through revision. Once I have got the final thesis idea and draft. I will go through audio recording by using Audacity to adjust the pitch and volume of each sentence. I guess that it probably sounds awkward and not smooth but I believe this approach is able to capture the main idea quite well. This may sound traditionally.

In additional, I also plan to insert real video into my project to make it more meaningful and interesting. There will be the interviews of other people whose experiences happened to be similar. There should be common ground among international students in this place, I believe.
Being a new comer is feeling like I am a small seed falling into the new ground. It seems to be still in the nutshell from outside appearance but inside it is so packed up. It needs to be sprung for flowering but it is now depressive to struggle through the transition. (I like these phrase!, probably I will include to the conclusion)

I will spend the Spring Break to finish up the draft and try to do the sample video. Well, I not sure that will there be many people staying on campus to interview. If I have got some, they would be the right ones who are feeling lonely and depressive from being stuck on campus. I expect the depressive emotion to my video.

Digital audio interview

Digital audio interview

• What literacies do you practice and value? In you life? At home? in the classroom?
• What literacies are most important to you? Why?
• In what areas are you illiterate? Talk about an area of literacy that matters to you. Tell why.

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Production

This interview audio project was conducted on week 3 - week 4 by using Audacity. Production was done by layering music that I grabbed from freeplaymusic . The introduction part was done separately and later joined into the main part by inserting in front of it. It had to be careful to place the background music under the appropriate track. This consumed time during the production.

When the final track was finished, it was saved in .wav file format. There was the technical problem to my audacity program said that it needed LAME library to handle .mp3 encoding by asking for 'lame_enc.dll' file. By browsing to audacity program folder, I could not locate the required file. Therefore I could not encode the .wav file to .mp3 by using audacity. I needed to find another way to convert the file.

Google with "wav to mp3 converter" , I found around 400,000 results for solution. Most of the solution required to download the program to convert. Suddenly, I realized that why don't I convert without downloading the program. I just simply modified the search keyword to be ""wav to mp3 online converter" Bingo! I had got media.convert.com to help me out with this problem with convenience. It took less that 5 minutes to convert the audio file from .wav to .mp3. Moreover, you can convert different input to other output which are audio files, video, presentation, document, etc. The converting audio file is reduced more than 50% from 10 MB original size.

Once I have .mp3 file ready, I choose to host my audio file on ijigg.com because it looked more user-friendly to me. It worked independently without any program to play the media. This was more advantage that other popular programs like WindowMediaPlayer or RealPlayer. I just copied the embedded code of the audio media from ijigg.com to this blog. This technology was as simple as YouTube. Audiences did not have to download the file to save somewhere in the computer and opened player program. Both file and player were bundled together and made it easy to listen or see the media. As you can see above, the player interface is simple to use.

Thank you for listening to my audio project.

Sunchai

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