Our assignment for Week 5 involved choosing a Mashup assignment from the DS106 Assignment Bank. I have to admit that I had no clue what to choose – nothing was speaking to me. I finally went with the Vine It Then Combine It challenge as I haven’t worked much with Vine.
My subject matter, pretty much by necessity, is the new library building for Douglas County Libraries in Lone Tree. This was our last hurrah for getting everything together before opening the doors this weekend and my time was very devoted to helping out and attending related functions. So…I decided to tell a story about the “future library” from a child’s perspective.
As I started creating Vines, I couldn’t quite envision what to do with them. I wasn’t feeling a story emerging. I think I struggled with the technical aspects of making something interesting in six seconds. I was starting to get a bit down about the project at this point, and really considered switching to another assignment all together.
While poking around in my files, however, I realized that I had some kind of fun additional formats that could help fill out my story a bit better. So, I expanded my mashup and included other video I had taken, as well as stills, and some of my Vines, and started putting them together in Windows Movie Maker. The story started making more sense to me, and I felt nicely challenged by making what I had on hand come together into a story.
After getting the visuals into a reasonable layout, I outlined a script and recorded myself in Audacity timed roughly to the video. I did a bit of research on changing sound settings to make voices sound younger, and adjusted the pitch of my recording upward by two “half-steps.” I then tweaked video timing to improve the coordination between audio and visual, uploaded the video to YouTube, and came here to share it with everyone!
I noticed that I lost some of the video stabilization in one section of video, which I don’t entirely understand. But, overall, it turned into an interesting and fun project for a week full of library themes.
