“A Balancing Act” is a presentation of my narrative research paper, this remix is not as focused on statistics and facts the way that my paper was. It’s more focused on showing how an informal education is more prevalent and important in the twenty first century and that students and teachers alike should embrace the way that education is evolving to include more than just what one learns in a classroom . I felt that for this video my target audience should be students, parents, and teachers. Since I wanted to reach such a broad and varied audience I decided that I should make the video simple and not hard to understand. I did so by using very simple language that could be understood by all and made it more of a video that could be considered entertaining to watch rather than an informative video that just mentioned one fact after another on the importance of both a formal and informal education. I think many people would get bored and disinterested when watching such a video.

I tried to make my video bright and easy to follow so that those watching would not get bored with it and would watch the whole video through to understand the argument that I was making in this presentation. I believe that this was a very simple translation of my research paper into a different medium. It’s not as detailed or specific and doesn’t have any statistics or testimonials. I made a conscious decision to not include facts and statistics because I think sometimes when there are too many facts and words in a short video, people end up getting confused and mixing things up. Most of the video was made by me, I used Powtoons, an animation software to create the beginning of my video and also a Prezi presentation that I recorded and then combined with the Powtoons animation. There is also part of a clip that I got online that I combined it with some video snippets that I had taken myself and meshed them all together to make one video. I decided not to do a voice over because I thought that it would just be simpler and easier to understand if there were just words on the screen.  I also feel as though without a voice over people can form a better opinion on the topic than would’ve been possible had I been speaking and projecting my opinions on the topic to them since it wasn’t all based on facts. If someone is just watching the video and reading along, they themselves can give meaning to the video, but once there is someone speaking in the background and in a way projecting their opinions then meaning has already been given to the video. I also chose to put music in the background, I felt that adding in music tied everything together and made it more of a video than the slideshow it was before I added it in.

Remaking this has really changed my paper, the paper was based more on facts and on my own personal experience but this was much broader and just included pictures and videos. So that anyone watching could relate to it and understand without needing someone to explain it to them or having to read about what they are watching.

In redoing this I’ve realized it’s different from my paper because it doesn’t include any of my experiences or those that I wrote about in my paper. I think that I have gained an easier way to explain what my paper was really about and make it easily understood by whoever decides to watch it.  I think my remix is an appeal to pathos more than it is to logos, it’s meant to engage viewers through images and words but not really through hard facts which is how I think it differs the most from my paper.

My argument was that education is always changing and learning happens outside of school, in the video as an example of learning outside of school I used traveling and trips to make my point. I start off by explaining what exactly informal and formal education is and from there I make points on how as times have changed, so have the ways that education is presented and learning is done. I try to make the point that there are many things that are learned in school and that teachers play a large role in our lives. I also make a point of showing that there are many things that are learned outside of school in a setting other than that of a classroom that are important to the development of well rounded individuals. Different learning methods and modes can give a person more options to help them find out which way is best for them to aid them in becoming and doing the best that they can in all that they do.

One of the biggest challenges I had was figuring out what exactly to do and how to do it, I at first was just going to make an animated video presentation that was mainly centered around statistics but then I realized who I wanted my target audience to be and decided that I should make it simpler. I chose certain images and videos because I felt they were relevant to the argument that I was trying to make and the point that I am trying to get across to my audience. Picking out the technology that I ultimately ended up using was probably a longer process than figuring out what I wanted my video to include and do. I at first was set on making it all an animation on Powtoons but I didn’t like the way that it was turning out so I turned my attention to imovie but realized that I would have to buy it so that was out of the question. I googled all different type of video making softwares and then came across Adobe which offers a free 30 day trial which I immediately jumped on because I had this picture in my head of a video that looked professional and what better software than Adobe? What I hadn’t realized was that using Adobe is harder than it looks. It took me a few hours to figure out how to properly use it and even then I managed to deal my project three times. Learning from my mistake, I saved my project in a few different places so that I would have a backup if I managed to delete it again. In my final version of this I also added in an appendix since I was missing that before in my draft.

Both of the members in my writers group had only told me to make minor changes which I tried to fix. One of the things I was told to maybe change was one of the slides that I had in between the realistic videos so that it flowed better. I tried to do that but when I removed that part of the video and tried to insert a different slide the software crashed and told me that I would have to make a new video to make changes or to buy the full version of the software. Since I was not willing to spend close to $150 on buying the software or remaking the video all over again because it would take so long to do so I decided not to change it up. I know that it would have flowed better but I never realized how a two minute clip needs so many hours spent on it just to make it decent. I think that even though it might not be the most aesthetically pleasing aspect of my video, it wasn’t worth redoing the whole thing and probably running into a host of other issues while doing that. I also looked into fixing the fonts since there were three different ones and I wanted to make it flow better but to do that I would have to make a new powtoons cartoon as well as a new prezi presentation and then put it all back together into one video. I did slow down portions of my video so that it would be easier to read and I had a few people look it over and make sure that it was slow enough to read but not too slow that someone would lose interest. When uploading my video I kept having problems with it because my video is around two and a half minutes long, but the video would post as seven minutes long and it’s just a blank screen after the video ends. I tried to cut it out but it wouldn’t work and I was unsure about how to fix it.  Overall I think that I would have been able to make bigger changes had I been more adept at using all of these different softwares to make the video look as professional as could be. At this point in time, videography does not seem like it’s going to be my future career or something that I will excel at.

 

Link to Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGFt7o_HZY