It is official, the Lexw Qwo:m trail is now open to the public. After plenty of hard work from the community, and the Outdoor Ed’s many hours of back breaking labour hauling gravel, the trail is ready to be hiked on by the public. It has been a slow month for us getting on the trail as there has been so little to do.
The class is excited to be interviewed by the local newspaper, this Thursday, to talk about our work on the trail. We are hoping to get started on a new trail come January, but with the colder weather it is harder to work the soil, and we will likely be taking a hiatus till the spring thaw.
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This month we have been exploring the capabilities of the GoPro’s, and recently began using Movavi to edit small class projects. As with many new learning opportunities the class and I have quickly learned that there is a lot that we don’t know, and the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to learn! It has been a steep learning curve, and I am sure that as we continue to explore the devices and programs that we will be amazed about what we can create.
Over the last three months we have been working hard on building the Lexw Qwo:m trail. Each time we have been on the trail on the trail we have rotated who is in charge of the GoPro’s, allowing a unique perspective to be captured. With no one in the class having past experiences with GoPro’s we’ve been having lots of on-the-fly learning, and multiple days where what we captured was not exactly what we were expecting. As with most technologies our knowledge has been growing with use. Unfortunately, a good portion of what was captured isn’t fitting into our planning of what we had envisioned our end product to look like. While on the trail we’ve attempted time lapse videos of students building the trail. Sometime these time lapses turned out wonderfully, other times a raindrop blurred the lens, or the GoPro shifted ever so slightly thus altering the range of captured video. Most of the time lapse videos take over an hour to film, and not knowing of the problem till after the fact has resulted on a good portion of filming opportunities being lost. Most of the work on the trail is time consuming and requires substantial energy, and it’s often not possible to replicate the task at hand. This problem is encouraging the class to sharpen their critical thinking skills and find ways to work around this the cinematography issues. Other problems that we have had pertain to audio. We have tried to conduct a variety of interviews with key stakeholders, but the surrounding area is filled with the sounds of nature, and sometimes these sounds take over and the speakers voice isn’t audible. Other times we’ve had issues where a student has said something inappropriate, and aspects of the video need to be edited to ensure the class code of conduct is being maintained. One of the biggest issues, which we feel we are getting a firm grasp on, is angling the GoPro when mounted on the head. When we have set up the GoPro we envisioned the range of field to be different from what was captured. We’ve had a few videos where just the top half of the interviewees head is visible. The Lexw Qwo:m trail is now finished, and we are starting to feel confident about our abilities to use the GoPro’s, but we’ll need work on a new trail to recapture some of the work done. As we have been looking at the footage we’ve captured we are quickly discovering how overwhelming it is to sift through the volume of video to find the optimal clip. We are now working on categorizing all videos immediately after filming and putting a description in the file for when we make our final project. We have also learned how quickly the videos consume storage on the hard drives and will be purchasing an external drive to ensure we don’t slow down the computers! On the editing front the students have enjoyed exploring the Movavi program. They’re busy making short films and editing them. The goal is for them to become familiar with all available options in creating a polished product. Many of the groups are getting creative with how they edit their short film to increase the entertainment value. I am hoping that like most things with the younger generations that they’ll soon surpass my knowledge, and be able to teach me how to better use the technology. |
AuthorsThe Education Centre's Outdoor Education Class!!! Archives
May 2019
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