This is an interview with Wiley Hunnicutt who discusses a unit she did on tolerance with 8th graders at Byrd Middle School. This particular version is for a PTA night there having that focuses on 21st century skills and technology integration.
Wiley1 is an amazing teacher and speaks passionately and intelligently about this unit. I’d be happy to have my children in her class.
Tolerance Unit from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.
Things about this video that I don’t like.
The sound is all jacked up. We had to shoot this in a room with multiple servers running and it was incredibly noisy. I tried dropping it out but the result is pretty tinny and slightly mechanical sounding. Additionally, I learned that if you edit the audio after clipping the video it won’t apply across clips and you’ll have to edit each clip individually. I do not recommend this.
It’s not bad for one camera man (me) shooting from two cameras but it’d be nice to have some B roll to mix in. I didn’t spend as much time as I should have balancing the look of the two cameras either. The levels are not the same and that’s irritating. One of the issues is that any time I do anything to the clips shot on the 5DMKII I have to re-render and that is incredibly annoying and time consuming. That’s one reason I went with black and white. It was easier to get similar looking colors and I figured it was appropriate given the somber subject. I worry that it’s a little melodramatic though.
In the end what I really want is to splice student work, classroom shots from the project and interviews of the teacher and students into a more complete picture of the unit. That’s our next step with these videos. We’ll then put them on the web with student work samples and tag them so they fit in with our 21st century skills modules.
1 For those who’ve been around since the Bionicteacher days, Wiley was one of the teachers who did the Richard III blog with me back when I worked at Byrd and actually saw students occasionally. The other teacher was Jim Coe, who used to write on this blog before retiring.
I heard once from a guy that had done a lot of video work that when you do transitions a fade tells the person “A period of time is passing” and a cut tells them “This is a different view in the same time”. If you watch movies and interviews with multiple angles this holds true. So my humble suggestion would be instead of doing fades between the cameras to try cutting at specific points and see if the effect isn’t a bit more solid. Love the video though!
Good point Tim. I need to spend some time looking at the vocabulary of film. It’s not something I’ve ever focused on. I like film but I’ve never spent time analyzing it.
Perhaps a lapel microphone?
Great video, but it helps when you have great material to start with.