This assignment required me to make a movie and upload it to YouTube. I’m very familiar with YouTube and I watch it all the time, but when it came to making my own video it was pretty hard. I found myself wanting to make a cat video and I kept thinking about ways I could incorporate my cat into an educational lesson!
But I resisted. And I kept thinking. It was hard, because since my focus is preschool, I wanted to make a video that a preschool-aged audience could understand and enjoy. So I knew it couldn’t be a video with much text. And I also am not computer-savvy enough to create my own animation. I was nervous about putting myself in the video, but I finally decided that that would probably work best.
Inspired by the season, I decided I wanted to do something pumpkin related. And then I thought back to the beginning of the semester when I did my Wiki page project. I had written about virtual field trips, which I had known very little about before. But once I read about them, I found that they were very interesting, and a great way to help children learn in a “hands-on” way without actually leaving the classroom. My own preschool class isn’t allowed to take field trips, which I think is unfortunate. I was thinking about how I would love to take them to a pumpkin patch to help them learn about and pick out pumpkins. So I decided to visit a pumpkin patch and make my own virtual field trip. This is something I can play for them at school so they can still have a pumpkin patch experience!
Making the video was a lot of fun. I went to Lynd’s Fruit Farm with my husband and we used our Kodak handheld HD video camera to take the video. We just had a nice afternoon picking out pumpkins, and then we ventured into the apple orchard. We shot some great video there, so I decided to make the video about pumpkins and apples. Then we took the raw footage home and edited it in Adobe Premier. I used to work at television stations so I used to have to edit video for work, so this part was easy. I wrote up a quick script and did a voiceover, and then added some pictures for emphasis. I also found some fun banjo music to play in the background to set the mood!
It was really fun putting together a video again. I hadn’t realized that I missed doing it! This was also good practice for putting together our own wedding video from the raw footage we got at the wedding! You can click here to watch my pumpkin patch/apple orchard virtual field trip video in a new window, or you can watch it below. Enjoy!
Miss Stephanie's Site 