Another day, another 90-second video. This time, I want to do the same subject as the poem video, only convert it to an essay. How exactly does that work? Well. my plan was to begin by taking the iMovie project for the poem and duplicating it. I was extremely pleased to see when I opened up the Project Library, that the File drop-down menu offered “duplicate project” as an option. It was that easy. I changed the name from “Cadle concept90 project fallow copy” to “Cadle concept90 project fallow essay.” I clicked “edit project” and started work.

The first thing I needed to do was to delete the voiceover. It would be replaced by a paragraph that approached the same subject in a more direct way. Of course, I had to write the paragraph, and I went through three fairly fast  drafts until I had what I wanted in a form that fit the time allowed. I read each draft aloud, and the third draft was just over a minute, which is a good length. That way i don’t have to speed talk and I also don’t have to talk over the title or credits.

Once I had that down, it was time to turn to the images. Unlike the poem, I wanted to parallel images with the words this time. The paragraph mentioned specifics that matched photos from my family archives, which meant adding four new photos to the video. Of course, that added more time, eight seconds to be exact. That was fine. with the heavier input from family photos, the balance needed to flip from the nature sequencing that was in the foreground with the poem. Cutting eight seconds was easy–I cut one bird photo that had the wrong number of birds for the new sequence and I snipped two of the longer videos. That put it at 90 seconds again.

One of the most important changes was flipping the opacity between the photo stream and the 10 second medical clip that was one of the cutaways. In this version, the examining room video is far more visible over the photos.

day 3 screenshotThis weekend I will do the voiceover and any additional tweaking I may need to do in order to match specific images with text. I will also consider adding key phrases as screen text if I can get them to match with the spoken words.

Here is the draft:

Published by llcadle

Author of the poetry collection The Tethered Ground and Professor of English at Missouri State University. Contact me for readings or for workshops on writing/publishing and on teaching writing online.