Reflection Paper #1
The Digital StoryTelling Project was my first of the semester and eased me in to the expectations of the class. This project started off with written narration to a photo that meant something to me, then I had to compliment this written piece with a video. I implemented a audio recording of my narration into a video with pictures, music and little bits of annotations. The final piece was a project that perfectly blended all these elements to explain the circumstances of a photo. This project was by no means easy though, I faced a lot of obstacles and I felt I could have really improved. I run into problems when I wanted to record my written Narration, edit the video for the project and even uploading.
Writing the Narration and editing came somewhat easy to me because I already had a lot to say about the photo and the story behind it, but recording my voice was a whole different story. I found myself getting nervous when recording my voice due to the fact that I realized that someone was going to listen to it. In turn, I had to delete more than thirty audio files off my phone because I would either slip up, stutter, or I simply did not like the sound of my own voice. At one point I gave myself a break and took a shower just to clear my mind, that did not help me at all. I always heard of writer’s block and had it a lot throughout my life, but now “speaker’s block” became the bane of my existence. After a while, I stopped recording and just tried to get comfortable with speaking my writing out loud. Then with my last few recording, I ended up producing my best result with minimal errors and it be. I pushed through my first big obstacle of the project through concentration and a bit of luck.
Editing the video was a bigger obstacle I had to face in this project. First was the problem of which software to use because I felt that for my vision I had very limited options. We-Videos was especially very limited(Unless I paid), but in the end I chose to use imovies to get the project done. I had some experience with imovies, but specifics like implementing multiple pieces of audio and including writings with my pictures started to slow me down. I ended searching through tutorials on youtube to get the hang of it and soon I did. Then came the problem with balancing the right pictures to match the scenario I was trying to build for this project. I wanted people to know the type of people my family was through these images, so they can perceive their own truths and fictions about us through them. At first I knew the photos I wanted in the video, then I realized I didn’t have enough photos. I didn’t want to simply put any photo and digging through a limited supply took me longer than expected. It took me a while to acquire more photos and edit my video in a way I was satisfied with. In the end, I did what I believe to be my best at that moment.
Overall, I do believe my project was objectively good but there were areas I could’ve really improved on. One instance was the written narration, which at the time I thought was decent enough, however looking back now I could’ve drawn more comparisons between the truths and fiction. I also believed the final video could’ve been brushed up on. The transitions and photo sequences in the video seemed a little awkward to me at times, but it was my first time using imovie in that way so my editing skills were not on expertise level yet. Even my final audio recording in the video, you could hear a few moments of me stumbling over my words which would take away from the video altogether. Besides these lacking areas of mine, I do believe I did well in others. My narration did do a great job of creating a story from a single image and creating this comparison of (what you see/behind the scenes); truth vs. fiction. Other aspects of my video trying to align some images about what I was talking about was also something I take a little pride in. As the first project I have done in this format so in-depth, I performed to the best of my abilities and produced satisfactory results. This project helped me build as a writer, editors, and thinker; furthermore with it I was able to learn a little of what I must do to succeed in this class.
