357 - A Week in Bali

Day 357. I finally got around to editing some of the video footage I collected in Bali the other week. This was all shot on a GoPro camera on a GoPole (basically a video selfie stick). Music is a Creative Commons track via Jamendo.com and it was edited together using Adobe Premiere Pro.

341 - An iPad Year in Review

Day 341. During 2014 our Year 5 and 6 students have been part of a 1:1 BYO iPad program, which has been largely quite successful. I still think we have lots of unrealised potential for what we should be expecting kids to do with those devices, but for the first year of the program it's been a great success.

We will start off the incoming students for next year with an information session about the iPad program, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask a few of our current students for their advice about being an iPad enabled student.  I asked them three simple questions and collated their answers in this short video...

317 - Making Mo

Day 317. Coincidentally, the day after my daughter Kate sent me a link to the video she helped make (yesterday's create) I got an email from my son Alex sharing a video that he made with his friends to promote Movember. Again, I'm cheating a little listing here as a Daily Create but again I'm going to claim a DNA level connection to their creativity. That's my story.

This video was made by Alex using Breaking Bad as the theme. I've not watched Breaking Bad so a lot of the references went over my head, but I'm just impressed with the film anyway. Alex is studying law so I'm pretty amazed at his filmmaking skills.

316 - Stepping Stones

Day 316. Ok, I'm cheating a little here as I didn't actually create this film. But my daughter Kate stars in it, so I'm going to claim some sort of DNA level connection to the creativity. The film was actually made by two of her friends Elise Harman and Emma Elliott, and Kate and her friend Lucas starred in the main roles. Enjoy!

245 - About that Map

Day 245. Yesterday I showed you some little buildings and structures cards I made for my Year classes to do a mapping activity. Today's create is a video explaining how to use them. I'll be heading over to Singapore on Thursday for the EdTechTeam Summit, and I didn't want my Thursday class to fall behind the others so I made this video for their teacher to show at the start of the lesson so that even though I'm not there they can still get things done.

205 - We Got Rhythm

Day 205. Today's create was made with a fun little iPad app called VidRhythm. You record video of yourself making some noises, then the app sequences them into what you see here. It's easy and fun.

172 - Backyard Barbeque

Day 172. Here's Linda, sitting in the backyard minding her own business, when out of nowhere, zap! Backyard barbecue of a different kind. There are a few apps for the iPad that do this sort of thing, but this little clip was made using one called Exploder Cam.

169 - Boy Racers

Day 169. While at the Flat Connections Conference this week I had the opportunity to take the students outside one afternoon and show them how to make stop motion videos. This is just a quick little sample we made but the kids went on to do some very cool little videos that showed a great deal of creativity and fun.

141 - Drawing on Experience

Day 141. Today's create was made using an iPhone app called SketchVid. It lets you sketch over the top of a photo, and turns that sketch into a 15 second video file. I made three of them, editing them together using iMovie, then added some music and uploaded to YouTube using Google"s YouTube Capture app.

113 - We All Video

Day 113. I'm at the Google Summit in Christchurch today and I sat in on Wes Warner's session about editing video with Chromebooks. Although Wes spent most of the time using the YouTube Editor, I messed about with WeVideo, a cloud based video editing tool that works in the browser.

I shot this footage on my Nexus 5, uploaded directly to WeVideo from the phone, then logged in on my computer to edit the footage. It's only a quick and simple example, but it shows what sort of video editing can be done in a browser.

109 - A Perfectly Good Airplane

Day 109. I did my first skydive this morning and couldn't help but buy the overpriced video package they sell with it.  Of course I wanted to put it on YouTube, but they had copyright music with it (how do they get away with that? I guess they must pay royalties)  Anyway, I ripped the DVD, re-edited the clip using Adobe Premiere Pro, added some Creative Commons music, a few new titles, and re-rendered the whole thing.

Thanks to my mum who gave me the jump as a birthday gift last year, and to Linda who came along for moral support this morning. Would I do it again? You bet.

080 - He Shoots, He Scores!

Day 80. The glare of the lights, the roar of the crowd, the thrill of the beautiful game. Foosball. This very short video was made using a GoPro camera, edited with iMovie on a Mac, with sound effects from SoundDogs.com.  It was also the first time I've tried using the Action Replay option in iMovie. Thanks to Al for his help with this one.

078 - Chalk and Talk

Day 78. At school today we had a fun activity for our Year 11 homerooms. As a group, they had to come up with a chalk drawing based on a given theme. After a bit of brainstorming the day before, they created this idea for their artwork. I propped up the iPad and set iMotion to shoot a frame every 5 seconds to create this short video of their work.

I'll bet you can't guess the theme. Partly because I'm not sure we actually met the brief for the theme at all, but mostly because the theme was pretty darn obscure in the first place.

076 - 300 Frames

We live just up the street from a frame shop, which sits on the corner of the intersection. While out walking the dog tonight I stopped near the frame shop and was struck with an idea to make a stop frame animation. So this is 300 frames at the frame shop.

It was shot on my Nexus 4 phone using an app called Lapse It Pro, then rendered and exported as 720 mp4 files, editing with a Android Movie Studio, and uploaded to YouTube. It's proof that you can make media on Android but let's be honest, it's still got a lot of catching up to do to compare with the media production capabilities of iOS.

050 - Flat Connections

Day 50. In June this year I will be helping facilitate at the Flat Connections Conference in Sydney with my fellow Aussie global educator Julie Lindsay. Julie suggested that those of us who are facilitating at the event might contribute a short video snippet introducing themselves and the event, and then asked if I would put them together into a single video. So after a few days of messing about in FinalCut Pro X, here is the finished product, presented as my daily create for today.

It'd be great to see some of you at the Flat Connections Conference in June... I'm sure it'll be an amazing few days!

 

040 - Release The Dragons

Day 40. The final day of the Sydney Chinese New Year celebrations finished with the Dragon Boat Festival at Darling Harbour. This is the second year I've been part of a dragon boat team, paddling with the HKETO team. This video was shot during our third heat, which we won, from a camera strapped to the head of our drummer Arthur.

I didn't really edit the footage much as I just wanted to share the actual race from start to finish as seen fro inside the boat.  It was shot on a GoPro Hero3 and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro and compressed to 720HD using Adobe Media Encoder.



We ended up coming second overall in one division and third in the other division.

029 - Target Acquired

Day 29. This little video was shot just outside my house using an app called MegaPhoto+. The app is actually a collection of hundreds of really interesting photo and video effects that can be applied directly in-camera and rendered live. For students making videos in class I can see lots of possibilities for making their videos more fun and interesting.

027 - Unnatural Acts

Sitting at my desk, weird things sometimes happen. This is the true story about the forbidden love between an Android phone and an iPad VGA adapter. Now let us never speak of it again.

 

022 - Row your Boat

Day 22. I was at Dragon Boat training this afternoon so I grabbed the iPad mini and used an app called iStopMotion to make a quick little video. Just another simple proof of concept video to show how easy it is to shoot stop motion stuff with an iPad.

018 - Fun in the Sun

Day 18. With the very hot weather that we're experiencing in Sydney at the moment we decided to head down to Boat Harbour at Cronulla for a morning swim. It was a beautiful summer day, and the nice thing about Boat Harbour is that you can drive right onto the sand if you have an AWD vehicle.

While we were there I took the GoPro out and shot some fun footage, then edited it later back at home using Final Cut Pro X. Nothing too fancy, I'm just trying to get my head around the workflows in Final Cut.  So this is my creative project for today.



PS: To my Canadian friends who are suffering through yet another Arctic blast at the moment, if you think I'm making these videos in a shameless and transparent attempt to get you to come and visit us down under, you're absolutely correct. :-)  What are you waiting for?