PE1_Playing_with_iMovie

Comfortable.  Now there’s a word I don’t hear very often these days.  And when I do, it’s really more like the candy house out in the woods, luring the lost and starving traveler into a life of unending labor, than a refuge from the dark.  So it makes me really nervous to say I think I’m getting a little comfortable with iMovie.  Theeeeerefore, I’ve gotten proactive in my comfort, stretching a little bit more each time I use it.  A few weeks ago, I added title slides at beginning and end; the next time I added some music; last week, after the Admirable Anne told me she’d made her OMM without talking (a proposition utterly antithetical to my natural bent), I added titles as captions over the different sections of my video.  So this week, I’m going to work on adding transitions.  Which is something I had planned to do last week—in fact, I’d made some wordles I was going to try to work in as part of them—but it turns out one minute is an infinitesimal smidge of time!  I couldn’t cut my content down one more millisecond!   So adding transitions was a luxury I didn’t have.

So, this makes it sound like iMovie isn’t going to be much of a challenge this week.  Well, first:  Bwaaahahahahaha!  (I refer you to the Hansel and Gretel allusion above.)  Second:  I have to do an iMovie for two of my classes this weekend.  You see, some time last month—around the time I was beginning to realize that cell phones would be fitting into my AR project in some way—I conceived the notion of doing instant video interviews to check for understanding of literature.  Well, I developed that, with help from our inimitable Tom, into an assignment to create an interview with a character from Beowulf.  Well, mid-semester grades are due after this weekend (no, I don’t imagine I’m going to eke out even my now-usual five hours of sleep nightly), so I HAVE to do something with those videos in order to grade them—and putting them together into a class iMovie, thereby killing two birds with one stone (with apologies to PETA), seems a productive strategy. 

Alas, I have a feeling that combining 15 videos, from various programs, on various media, is going to end up being more of a challenge than merely adding transitions between them.  I think I’d better get my resource page done first.

What do you call a person who sees the candy house, but knows the arduous outcome of partaking of its delicacies, and breaks off a big old hunk anyway?