PROJECT 1 -- explaining ORBS September 20, 2004 Concern, Confusion, & Creativity.
I originally wanted to do a PowerPoint presentation. This was my first project in my first ACTLab course, I had no idea what to do, and PowerPoint was about as technical as I got. Then a few weeks before presentation day, Taryn and Dacia made an announcement: “By the way, if you’re planning on doing PowerPoint, don’t. Please. It will suck, and we will all laugh at you.” That’s when I began to sweat. I asked Joe what to do and he said I should try making a movie. I was a little concerned, because I had only made a few movies in my time. One was called “Math Project” for Mrs. Deardorff’s 6 th grade class. The other was “Cody’s CDs Movie,” which was basically a video compilation of every inside joke shared between me and my friends. In short, I had know idea what to make my video about, nor how to go about making it.
Brandon, trying to make it easy on me, said, “Well what interests you?” I blanked. Suddenly, I didn’t have a single interest. He basically told me to think about it, and go with whatever sounds good. Soon after this, my best friend and his family were showing me the pictures from their “Haunted Alton” ghost tour up in Illinois. They were telling me about a strange phenomenon called “orbs.” It seemed there were numerous transparent circles all over their pictures from the tour. Yet there were none in the pictures from anywhere else on the trip. Didn’t really make sense, and I didn’t buy it. I decided that this would be a perfect topic for my first project. I would show what some so-called “experts” on the subject have to say (actual explanations taken from the internet), and then test it out myself. I didn’t expect to get any results, and that would be my movie. I had planned to prove the theories wrong. The only thing was that my pictures actually came back with orbs in them. Now I’m not saying I believe in the notion of ghosts being visible through the lens of a camera, but this certainly was odd. I couldn’t think of any logical reason, so I opted to make up my own, and decided logic wasn’t really even all that important. The story of my movie was complete.
Now to make it. I had no idea how. My sixth grade video had been shot entirely in order. We were eleven-year-old one-take-wonders. And the CDs movie had been very crappily edited through the VCR. In class, people were talking about things like Premiere, Avid, and Final Cut, but I had no idea what these were. Then one day, about a week before presentations were due, I noticed I had a little program called “Windows Movie Maker” on my computer. I went to Joe and asked for help. He showed me the basic ins and outs, as well as a few tricks, and instructed me to just “go home and play with it.” I did just that. By the end of that first night, I had completely redone the Paris Hilton sex tape, and taught myself a few Movie Maker tricks in the process. I had gained a bit of confidence, and felt it was now time to move over to my project. I worked on it whenever I got a chance during the day, and stayed up pretty late every night seeing what all I could do, and getting my project done. I finished it around 9 o’clock in the morning on Monday, after staying up countless hours over ACLFest weekend.
ONWARD!!! |