Separation Through Video

The purpose of the group video project was to create a self video that represents oneself, without any verbal communication. Once the self video is created, it’s time to collaborate with group members to make a non verbal video on a specified topic. The topic that was chosen for our group representation was separation. The project required students to team up with three other individuals in the classroom.  Having the capacity to team up with other peers allows us to build skills that will benefit all of us in the long run. Working as a group can always be difficult as everyone has a different work ethic and creative process. Especially when having to create a video without verbally expressing its concept. Since the group video had to be silent it was time to get to work to see how we were going to express the act of separation. As we all met as a group for the first time we ran through ideas of things we could record that show “separation.” It is important to keep in mind not to confuse the video as it may be pictured as something else, for example abstract or time. While the creative clouds flowed, it was evident that this project was not going to be as easy as all of us thought it would be. As we continued to think of ideas for separation, we thought it would be easier to put all the self videos into one for the group project. This would represent the separation of roles in life. Some group members had hidden talents, others had a completely different lifestyle outside out of the classroom, but the one similarity we shared was being students. Since both the self video and group video were not allowed to have any type of verbal communication in it, we all had to decide on a music track that would go behind our self videos. While we spent the next weekend filming our self videos, it was clear that this video was not going to be a quick project. Throughout the self video, there was multiple short clips that were filmed to show the different parts of my life. It took about two weeks to get the best footage that highlighted aspects of our lives. During these two weeks a peer from another group did not show up, so that meant that one of our team members had to be switched over to the abstract group to help them out. Since our classroom is taught like the workplace, our group had to be prepared for the sudden changes. As much as we had sudden interruptions we were still able to keep our original idea for our group project. By this point all of our filming was done and it was time to start the editing process. This included choosing which videos of myself were going to be included. I had footage of hiking, eating and sharing moments with friends and family to choose from. I had to start cutting my clips and putting them in the order of how I wanted them presented in the video. Since Imovie was unable to launch on our computers we had to get onto adobe premiere. Imovie is definitely a much easier tool but adobe premiere was an excellent way to challenge us and

become knowledgeable in a new program. The editing process was extremely hard since everyone was at a different level of experience and for most of it we had to teach ourselves. Luckily, one of my group members was able to give me short tutorial on how to work adobe premiere. Due to weather conditions and the holidays this project was extremely delayed. Causing my group members and I to meet during times outside of the classroom to work on our group project. It is definitely a prideful moment when you teach yourself a new tool that could come in handy in future work. While working with adobe premiere I taught myself to insert music tracks, transitions, and speed up the duration of the video, which helped me speed up my clips so they could all fit the one minute mark. Further, I learned how to color edit my videos so the video quality doesn't look bad. Lastly I was able to continue to practice on how to properly save and zip videos into files. After multiple nights in the lab trying to make our videos perfect I could easily say this was a learning experience that I could not help but appreciate. Each of our self videos had different music tracks but when brought together shared the same concept of separation of roles.