Week Seven: Dr. Strangedean, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Chicken

Week Seven: Dr. Strangedean, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Chicken

In ICT class this week, we embarked on the production of a short video in which we developed our abilities and aptitude for making and editing video, while having a great deal of fun and including several fellow students and faculty. We decided early on to do something fun, rather than serious and thought that it would be an excellent idea to end with a rendition of the Harlem Shake, in which we would invite any faculty members willing to participate. We were pleasantly surprised when the Dean of Education, Dr. Cockerline was willing to not only dance in the scene at the end, but guest star as an angry principal.

Making the video was a lot of fun! We were lucky enough to get a selection of fun props and costumes from Mecca Productions, including a rather realistic-looking prop chicken, which I happily engaged in dancing around with at the end of the video. We discussed such things as appropriate angles and rotating of camera duties, while doing the shoot in two seperate sessions, one on Tuesday for the bulk of the video and on Wednesday afternoon for the Harlem Shake part at the end. While producing the video was the most fun part, editing in many ways is the really important work.

We had several ideas for music, including ragtime and a variety of pop songs, but chose to go with a relatively obtrusive backing track, so as to not distract too much from either the Harlem Shake at the end or the visual elements nearer the beginning. We used a single take of Stephanie's disapproval for several scenes, with the reasoning that it would be funnier if repeated. We deliberately left in a few jumpy cuts for humourous purposes, though I feel most of our transitions were reasonably smooth. We ended up with a video that was 3:43 long, but felt that cutting it further would result in the loss of valuable material (and comedy), so we didn't cut it any further.

Once we finished making the video, we uploaded it to YouTube, where as of this morning, our video has 272 hits, which indicates that it is being watched by at least a few people outside of our immediate circle! The process of making and editing a video was enormously fun, and I look forward to perhaps sharing the experience with a classroom in the future. I have considered the possibility of doing a video for my Grade 7 ELA class (or perhaps another class) and I think it would be a great deal of fun for students, as well as providing them with a lasting artifact of their hard work and creativity.