Day Four

Today started spectacularly.

We were given flip cameras. For free. Easy flash video cameras with three buttons. They have been the top sellers at Amazon since they were introduced last year.

Then we were sent filming each other for nursery rhymes. Which we would edit and make into a short film using whatever software came with our platform.

I wanted to do the preamble, but decided instead to have my team list the united states. My grand dream would be to switch off from one to the next to the next using an edit. But then it became the following:

me: alabama alaska
them: alabama alaska

And it became a bit tedious. Also, my voice preceded each of their lines, so I had to edit myself out. In retrospect, I should have simply done a nursery rhyme and been done in half an hour.

Unfortunately, I had to edit myself out and edit each speaker into an alphabetical list of all the states. To add insult to injury, I also had trouble with the rudimentary task of removing clips of film. So even though I selected the beginning and ending of each clip, I simply couldn't get the editing to do what I wanted. This turned to frustration.

And then I developed a work-around. I would "split" my video files each time I wanted to edit and then simply erase the part of the split that I no longer wanted. While this can't be the best way, it was the only way I could get this to work.

I had some time pressures and then I realized that I had some serious editing issues to do. Had I had more time, I would have explored MovieMaker in much more detail. I might even take the tutorial. I'm one of those people who RTFM as we used to say.