Chelsea Cronin Initial Walkthrough

[0:00] Screen Capture of the poem “Invictus” appears on-screen. 

Hey everyone, it’s Chelsea Cronin, and I’m here to do the walkthrough for my e-poem. Uh, I chose “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. I decided to go with the same poem I did for my poetry essay because I really liked the message and the visuals that the poem itself suggested. I had a vision for the video, and I thought it would be cool to create an e-poem so that it would be a politically minded video with a dramatic reading of the poem itself, but that also had an inspirational feeling to it. 

[0:32] Video editing software plays in the background

Camtasia did not seem too intimidating to me because I have done a few projects on iMovie before, so the idea of creating the video seemed reasonable to me. Camtasia ended up essentially being a more sophisticated version of iMovie with much more nitty gritty things to edit and create. I liked all of the editing options, and a few of the things I ended up using throughout the video were zoom and fade video features for the transitions and emphasis. I messed with the clip speed on a few of the clips and I used quite a few audio tools, so as I go through the walkthrough, I’m going to start by showing you how I chose the video clips I did, and the message behind each of those.

[1:11] Youtube screen capture of a speech by Nelson Mandela plays.

My poetry essay was about “Invictus” and the political message affiliation with Nelson Mandela. The message behind the poem “Invictus” was really interesting and inspiring to me. After writing the essay, I had this cool vision for what I wanted my e-poem to look like. I wanted to continue with the fundamental cross-sectiion of the poem of Nelson Mandela and his fight against apartheid in South Africa.

[1:31] Another Youtube video of Mandela plays.

The e-poem was meant to be inspirational, so my idea was to choose a bunch of politically minded videos that Nelson Mandela was speaking in, and then use those as, like, pieces after each stanza of the poem and the would create the message. So, what you’re seeing here is each of the videos I chose to use for the e-poem. My idea was that the first video would start out in black and white, and as the poem moved along with each consecutive video, I would restore color, and finally the last video would be in full color--sort of to go along with the idea of growing and achieving over time, much like Nelson Mandela himself did.

[2:13] Youtube videos of songs play in the background.

Honestly, to me, one of the hardest parts of creating my e-poem was trying to choose the music. I wanted something that had no words because of the audio in the videos and the reading of the poem by Morgan Freeman from the movie Invictus. So, I started the process of searching on the suggested music sharing site, but I couldn’t seem to find what I wanted there.Then I started scouring YouTube for the perfect background music, and it took quite a few searches before I stumbled upon the soundtrack that I ended up using. 

[2:32] The video editing software is again on-screen.

Even then, it took a while to choose the sections of the music that I wanted, and to create the transitions between music and voice audio. A few of the video editing issues I ran into included the quality of the video itself, as well as the limitations on my video editing skills. Because of this, I feel that the color motif was not well-executed, and not as obvious as I would have liked, and I will work on it in the revision process. As you can see here in the first video, the color is black and white, and in the last video, it is clearly displayed in full color. It is the middle two videos where this color motif execution becomes a bit murkier. But, to move on, I’d like to touch on why I chose these videos and how they pertain to the e-poem.
	Unlike some of the other e-poems, I did not choose videos to literally display the words in the poem, and I instead took the approach of choosing videos that exemplified the words in the poem themselves--more like an adaptation than a literal translation. Each video has an empowering message either of Mandela himself speaking or by another person speaking of Mandela and his life.

[3:37] Fast-Forwards to the last quarter of the video in the editing software.

It is here in this portion of the clip that some of the layering issues and fading out of one thing and into another could use some work. The transition here is rather abrupt, and needs to be smoothed out. It goes from Freeman narrating the poem, directly to Mandela speaking, but fades in a little too late to catch everything he says at the beginning of the video clip.

[3:53] Returns to the beginning of the video in the editing software.

In this last little bit, I would like to zoom in on some of the editing techniques and tools I used, and explain how I used them, and what my thought process was behind each decision. In this very first blurb about apartheid, I chose to have the words zoom in and zoom out. The idea was to open the poem with the title, and then creatively zoom in to the main idea of the e-poem--apartheid and South Africa--then zoom out and transition into the poem itself, but the execution needs to be slowed down so that the viewer will not be rushed while reading the intro. I stumbled across a video of Morgan Freeman narrating the poem “Invictus” in the movie he was in, and I just felt like I should use that audio because it was a really somber reading of the poem, and it seemed to capture what it was really all about. This is the first example of one of the videos that I chose that starts out in black and white, and the editing technique here is not only, like, color reduction, but we’re going to see in a second that it fades out, so the idea is that you would hear part of the poem and the video would fade in, you’d watch the video, then the video would fade out into the next part of the poem. Though it’s hard to tell at first, I added a little bit of color back into the video instead of doing black and white, and it also has the fade in and fade out feature.

[5:09] The middle section of the video is shown in the editing software.

This next clip was especially difficult to edit because of the audio nature of the clip itself. The audio was, like, extremely loud, both at the beginning and the end, so I had to, like, really work to clip the audio and fade in and fade out between the audio and the reading of the next part, so that came off, like, a teeny bit choppy in that process. Editing ended up being one of the biggest challenges for me. I need to work on creating smoother transitions and possibly learning new tricks to fix the minor editing errors. I can’t wait to edit these e-poems and see what I can tweak and fix to make the e-poem even stronger in style and message. Thank you for watching, and I hope you enjoyed my e-poem walkthrough.