Digital Media

Welcome!

I am sharing my journey to get my Master's degree as a "middle-aged-man"! I have a life goal to obtain my doctorate degree and was able to go back to school at age 49 for a great deal (my wife works at a university) and the program is designed for working professionals.

Course MPC 6300 - New Media

This class immersed me in digital media - thus this curated blog.

Project One

After creating a storyboard we were assigned to create a one minute video without dialogue to tell a story. I thought it would be super cool to write a story about a lonely cat that finds a friend in a new cat - an allegory of my granddaughters.

The storyboard was great IMO -  however... working with cats is as difficult as it gets and I scrapped all my video clips and turned to plan B - Getting dirt.

My biggest challenges came in knowing when to quit tweaking the editing. I learned the final result will never be as perfect as I want if I intend to meet any kind of deadline. Thinking of video in shots is illuminating. Dr. Tyler - our professor - said he hoped to "ruin all movies" for us by teaching us to see all videos in shots. Movies are not ruined for me but instead there is a new dimension to what I see while watching movies.

I feature our new home by showing how we have to go buy a truckload of dirt and then move it one wheelbarrow at a time to our backyard.

Project Two

Project number two was to capture audio cleanly creating a podcast. I love US History and chose to talk about the Declaration of Independence. Finding a good place to get clean audio depends on many factors. The capture device is just one of them. You must also find a location free from noise distractions. My son, a budding podcaster, himself, has foam padding in a corner of his room. Although that helps, it is still best to invest in a good microphone.

Soundcloud is a great place to host audio. You can post about 2 hours of audio before you incur any costs and then it is not all that expensive.

Click on the image to hear it.

Season One: Episode Two - Virtue in the Constitution

On to number three...

Project Three

We were challenged to combine video and audio with a B-roll. A B-roll is what you show the audience while playing the audio to describe what is going on. In this case I created a promotional video for my wife's department at Weber State, the LEAP department. This took many more hours of editing. My biggest problems were that I failed to create a complete storyboard and plan beforehand. I took a lot of video clips and then did my interview. Dr Tyler told us to do the interview first and I learned the hard way how good his advice is.