Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Speed of Light

This project required making an Animated Video Short with Animoto. The URL is:
http://animoto.com/play/UFu1KKgw0ot04SbDb9aEnw

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The story behind this short video is that my daughter had come home for Spring Break and as we caught up with what was going on in her life, she made a gesture that took me back to when she was a baby.The time from when she was 6 months old and gesticulated as she had just done now at 23 moved at the speed of light for me. So much of life is like that, as if you just blinked and then you are somewhere else far removed and that was my inspiration for my story. I didn't want to tell a story of nostalgia since that has melancholic connotations and I was very happy having lunch and girl talk with my adult daughter. I wanted to evoke the urgency of life and say that you have to grab on tight, hence the song I chose to go with the video.

Even though this was part of a class project for my Digital Storytelling course and my classmates were my intended audience, I can't wait to show my family what I did and what it means to me. Because Animoto guides you through the project and gives you a limited range of clips or photos and music to chose from, I do not feel I had much creative input other than my intent in making the video. I didn't know what to expect in making the clip through Animoto, especially since all of this technology is so new to me. However, I felt the project was greatly assisted by their step-by-step guidance.

The slight hindrance I found with Animoto is that I wish there were more clips available for each genre. Most challenging to me was trying to make the clips fill the allotted time, so I got a little confused setting the duplicates to play from the beginning and some were cut off earlier than I would have liked. On the other hand, the great highlight of the project was picking the music and then seeing how it all came together.

I learned to put images and music together, which is quite an experience for me. I know this is old hat for a lot of people but the great thing about being so green is being filled with such an amazing sense of wonder!