June 08, 2008
remix 2: Blur, featuring Sir Ken Robinson...
Last weekend, I put together a crude video based presentation by synching a slide of presentation slides and images to a tune by a popular beat combo (Changing Expectations: Educational Publishing):
Martin used a similar technique in his video response, which along with the original version is also available in this annotated form (described here: YouTube annotations (on edupunk video)):
This weekend, I originally thought I'd have a go at doing a 'live visuals' mix using the Arkaos VJ tool, but the quick experiment I did produced a screen recording with quite a poor resolution (though maybe I didn't explore the settings enough...).
The second thought was to try to use some video footage alongside the stills using something like iMovie or one of the online video mixing tools, such as Jaycut or Jumpcut. A tweet from Martin declaring he was looking at Camtasia suggested he was thinking along similar lines, although I'm not sure how far he's got?
Rather than go down the video route, however, I instead opted for finding a better of way of producing a movie like the changing expectations one... to keep the creativity flowing, I also thought I'd mix a bit of audio in to the music track as well. Here's the result: remix 2: play, create (Quicktime required...) The visual narrative and synching is less developed than in changing expectations, so I declare this a first draft ;-)
A version of the movie is on Youtube, with the edupunk tag, but the transcoding at the Youtube end from the m4a format to Flash seems to have dropped out lots of the visuals? The audio is fine though... which was what I was mainly interested in playing with.
(If you want to see the visuals as intended, visit the blip site: remix 2: play, create.)
The audio quotes I mixed in to the blur track came from a Ken Robinson presentation: Creatively Speaking: Sir Ken Robinson on the Power of the Imaginative Mind. (I'd already ripped the audio using Audacity the crude way - using an audio lead to connect my laptop "speaker out" to the 'microphone in', playing the video, and using Audacity to record the audio coming in through the microphone socket.)
I used Audacity again to extract a selection of quotes (that is, audio samples), by highlighting the appropriate bit of audio and 'exporting selection'...
The audio mix was then created in Garageband, as a podcast project. As well as 'clean' audio samples, several effects tracks were used to apply different effects to the Ken Robinson samples.
Whilst thinking about the possible Arkaos video mix, I'd created a set of slides and images in Keynote to work out a possible visual storyline for the "There's no other way" audio track. (By exporting the slides as images, they could then be dragged into Arkaos in one fell swoop.)
The iWork/Garageband integration on a Mac also meant I could just drag the slides from Keynote into the podcast/image track of the Garageband project.
All in all, this took less time to put together than changing expectations, maybe 5 hours or so?
It also got me thinking about the 'image enhanced' podcast... so maybe next time, I'll have a go at just adding visuals to a spoken word track, such as the Ken Robinson presentation?
Tags: edupunk, garageband, blur
Posted by ajh59 at June 8, 2008 11:09 PM