Only Two more Blogs!!! 22 May

Yahoo! I only have to write two more blogs. This one will concentrate on frustrations and triumphs of doing things with digital images, still and moving.

FRIDAY: For a report for the Maryland State Arts Council, I decided to do a video of things that we did this year at Rockledge. I opened Movie Maker. I selected the clips to use. I added still pictures in it. When I checked to see how it looked, the dreaded red X's appeared. Oh yeah, I said to myself, I need backup on the desktop to keep working because I was going on and off CD's. I dragged the images off. I needed to finish it at home. I put copied all of the images from the desk top onto my thumbdrive, copied the Movie file, and took it home to work on the school's laptop.

I opened up the file on the thumbdrive and got the red X's again! I dragged all of the copied files off the thumdrive and put them on the laptop's desktop. I looked again at the movie, the video images were there, but the still images had the red X's. I gave up and decided to make a photo story.

I spent two hours making this really nice flow of images. I pulled from many CD's. I noticed that sometimes I couldn't make certain images appear on the viewing screen. They just stayed on the storyboard, but I wasn't too worried. It was a photo story. I knew I had planned well. I had the images selected already and listed on papers. Nothing was going to have a red X. Nothing had to be saved on the desktop. After two hours of working on it, THE STORY REFUSED TO STAY!!!! I went to bed and dreamed of how I longed for one of the new little HP computers instead of the Dell that had little or no space on it.

SATURDAY: I had to do a Power Point for a presentation I was doing with another person on Thursday. I found a design layout I liked. I added a little annimation as the photos flew into place. It took an hour and looked good. I had also decided to do the Arts report as a Power Point. I spent the next two hours adding text and photos to a show that (at that time) was 92 slides long. It looked good and told the story of the Arts events at our school.

MONDAY: I knew I had images on the school computer that I had not put on a CD, so I added more. I showed it to a few people and they liked it. I decided to add music. I selected Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue because it was long and could cover the time of the Power Point. I did not know how to do it and neither did others that I talked to. I decided to ask Jim Kerns, our instrumental music instructor because he had just done it for a PP presentation that he had worked on. I walked around the lake by my house and heard voices---no not that kind---voices of students talking about the arts. I wanted to add them to the first slide.

TUESDAY: I added a slide to preview the introduction of the slide show. I recorded the PK and two girls saying lines that were written on the screen. I had never recorded for a PP before so this was cool. Jim helped after school. I ripped the Gershwin piece to the Windows Media player. I knew enough to get that as a file ahead of time. Jim helped get the timing of the first slide going correctly. We played with this slide for a good 45 minutes before I came up with the idea to get rid of the text when the words were spoken. The presentation was now FABULOUS! The music timed perfectly with the images. I added the forgotten band and chorus concert and there was now 114 slides. I felt proud of the final piece.

WEDNSDAY: I completed work on the Movie Maker file. I deleted some of the still images. I added titles, transitions, and a little music to open and close the piece. I had trouble editing the moving images from the timeline. There was only one, so I kept it on there. Oh well. I copied the final draft to a CD. I was okay with the product, but it wasn't as well done and cool as the Power Point. I added the movie to the CD with the Power Point and put it with the material for the Maryland State Arts Council.

I am going to buy a small laptop.