Category Archives: Movies

Playing with MixBit as Video Remixer

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The founders of YouTube have put out a new video tool called MixBit, which is sort of like Vine and the Instagram video tool but with the twist of remixing. I’m still figuring it out, but here is a video of my dog on the floor.

What the site does is divide up your video into segments, and allows you to remix the video in other ways (or use segments from other people’s videos, which is interesting and worth investigating).
Here, I remixed some of my dog with some other dogs and cats on the site.

You know when something is new and you are still figuring out the possibilities? That’s where I’m at with MixBit right now.
Peace (in the mixing of bits),
Kevin
PS — Firefox does not yet play nice but Chrome works fine.

 

Considering Twine as Video Haiku: Letter to the Future

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Yesterday, a colleague in the National Writing Project’s Making Learning Connected MOOC made an observation about the Twine video app that brought something into focus for me. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl observed that while the six second limit on the video is short, one could almost imagine using twine as “haiku” and that reminded me of an interview that I read in Wired Magazine with the creators of Twine about how they envision folks having just enough time to film 2 second beginnings, 2 second middles, and 2 second endings to create a short narrative.

At first, I was thinking: yeah right.

Two seconds to set a story in motion and four seconds to complete it? It seems almost impossible to do so. But then Elyse’s comment about video haiku kept coming into my mind — what we did see the video in three parts. I wondered if it would be possible to tell a story in six seconds. How could you film something and leave much of it out? What would you expect the audience to infer?

A story began to form in my head … of writing to your future self. The story would begin with an envelope, addressed from the present self to the future self (in clear lettering, easy for viewer to read quickly); the next part would be crumpled up papers, showing frustration about what to write — and these would be mostly negative starts; and then ending would be a letter about love, being stuffed into the envelope to the future self. It would capture in six seconds the idea of what we want to pass on to ourselves in the years down the road. Hopefully, that would be love, and not worries, fears, and negative energy.

Thus, the short film:

What do you think? Although I shot the video in three short takes, I thought about the “story” for hours yesterday, visualizing how I would film it. Six seconds? Not a lot of time. But if you think of it like video haiku — three parts, looping over and over, hinting at something larger– Vine as a venue for storytelling starts to have possibilities.

See what you can make and share it out. Let’s inspire each other to push the technology in creative directions. Tell a story. You have just six seconds. Make each second count.

Peace (in the make),
Kevin

 

 

 

Using Vine: Coffee and the #CLMOOC in the Morning

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I’ve had the Vine video app (6 seconds and that’s it) on my iPad for some time now, trying to figure out how to use it. I am a fan of the concept of “short” (see my Ignite presentation from NCTE) so this seems like it would be a natural fit for me to try out. But I remain a bit at a loss of how to shoot a meaningful six second video. I mean, six seconds … that’s not just short — that’s wicked short (as they say here in New England.)

But with other friends in the Making Learning Connected MOOC starting to share their own vines, and looking for others to become part of the experience, I dug out the app again this morning, and decided to capture how important coffee is to my morning reading and writing experience. I sequenced it out in my head with four short scenes, and … it’s not bad, I guess.

Still, I continue to wonder … how might we tell a story in six seconds. A plot. A character or two. Dialogue? Still thinking that one over …

Peace (in the shortie shorts),
Kevin

 

Paper Airplane Bloopers

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If you have ever done a video project with students, you may notice how much they love bloopers. I’ve had kids who have finished a project and then asked, Can we make bloopers? As if bloopers were something planned instead of unexpected. They would actually stage the bloopers. And yet, bloopers add a real sense of fun to making movies, right? I always let them go ahead.

Anyway, I was working on a welcome video for our Making Learning Connected MOOC project (sign up now — the adventure begins on June 15), and we had this idea of paper airplanes coming into the frame. I’m not sure it is going to work. While I was filming, I had my youngest son shooting airplanes at me. Needless to say, it took us a few rounds. I didn’t get a good video, but I did get some bloopers … so why waste the footage?

Peace (in the miss and near miss),
Kevin

 

ReDiscovered Lines: My Own Found Poem

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I’ve been writing a lot of poems this month and yesterday, I decided to work on a found poem with my own poems, taking pieces from a bunch of them and stringing them together into something new. Then, I remembered that I have been wanting to try out the iMovie App on our iPad (a bargain for the $5 it costs, by the way). I shot the video all in our sun room, trying to vary the shots.  I was trying to make the video angles and ideas part of the poem itself, but I am not sure it worked out like that. The only shot not in that room is the last one because I wanted darkness to end the poem. That one was done in a closet.

🙂

See what you think:

Peace (in the video poetry),
Kevin

 

Movie Stardom: My Son and the Youth Film Festival

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Last summer, my then-7-year-old son  (he’s now 8) rounded up a bunch of friends and relatives and produced an 8 minute movie called Robbers on the Loose. The project was inspired by similar movie-making ventures by older kids in the neighborhood, including my older sons. As a production assistant (!) to my young son, I helped with some of the holding-of-the-camera and some of the video editing. But the story, the direction, the props (including our dog) were all of his ideas, and the end result was a goofy sort of cops/robbers story complete with a chase and battle scene. In our city, there is an annual Youth Film Festival that celebrates young filmmakers, and we sent his movie in on a whim.

We learned this week that his film has been accepted (the festival is today) and in the local newspaper yesterday, his name and his movie were featured in the promotional material. Boy, was he excited!

Robbers Loose news item

If you happen to be in Northampton today, from noon to 3, come check out the Northampton Youth Film Festival at the Academy of Music. We’ll be there, popcorn in hand, and maybe a camera of our own to try to capture the sense of his movie on the big screen.

Here is the trailer we had done for it way back in the summer:

Peace (in the moviemaking),
Kevin

 

My Son Turns the Camera on the Neighborhood

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My eight-year-old son’s summer project was a documentary video about our neighborhood. My wife and I helped a little bit (holding the camera when he did the interviews and I helped with the editing). But all the ideas of what to shoot and where to shoot, and what to ask, were all generated from his curiosity about the place where he lives. His project has me wondering how to get my students to do more of this.

Peace (in the ‘hood),
Kevin

 

Digital Writing Month: A Hyperlinked Video Poem

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As part of Digital Writing Month, I am refashioning an old multimedia poem piece using the YouTube annotation feature. With that tool, you can embed links in a video to other videos — in this case, all of the poems as videos are connected together in one larger project.  I’m not sure if this just gets too confusing to experience.

Peace (in the video poem),
Kevin

Video Talent: My Son and Friends Take First Prize

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My older son has really become a whiz with shooting and editing video. He does it for school projects; he works on short movies with his friends; and he does it to enter contests to gain recognition and cash. While I can take some credit for getting him behind the camera at an early age with our stopmotion movie adventures, he is at the age where I barely know what he is up to. (so far, so good, though).

Last night, he and three friends won first prize in a local contest to celebrate our city’s bike/rail trail. They shot and edited and submitted two videos — one with interviews of folks riding the trail on a summer day and the other is a tongue-in-cheek video about “what you can do on the rail trail.” That one ends with a friend playing dead. Turns out, that is the one that won first place (so at least the rail trail folks have a good sense of humor).

The boys will get a nice cash prize, which I assumed they would split up, but they have already decided to re-invest the money into the “full length” feature they are working on. The script has been in the works for about a month, and they are using Google Docs to write collaboratively. The cash will be used for props for the movie (not sure of the plot, but there was some talk of how they could stage a scene in a nightclub … hmmm). Look out, Hollywood!

Peace (in the vid),
Kevin