Video Ethnography with Kids: a Day in the Life

Some of you may find this useful.  UCB doesn’t own the book, unfortunately.

Hello Gustavo,
You have given me an opportunity to chime in to this list and say that
inspired by Joe Tobin’s ethnographic video investigation of preschool
education in three cultures, a group of colleagues and i embarked a
decade ago on a /Day in the Life/ project investigating early years
thriving around the globe. We filmed a full waking day in a number of
toddlers’ lives, created a compilation of filmed segments upon which we
then elicited reflections from the parents through iterative interviews
over the course of the study.  The project was published last year as:

Gillen, J. & Cameron, C.A. (Eds.). (2010). /International Perspectives
on Early Childhood Research: A Day in the Life./ Houndmills UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Here’s a description of the book, if I might:

This book presents an innovative approach to studies of early childhood
and human culture.The /Day in the Life/ international, multidisciplinary
team collaboratively coauthored this study of young children and their
families in seven countries worldwide. A novel visual methodology was
used that filmed a /Day in the Life/ of seven thirty-month-old little
girls in Thailand, Canada, Peru, the UK, Italy, the US and Turkey.
Different paths to thriving are illustrated through words and images to
capture interactions of the children with their environments, including
caregivers, using multi-modal, participatory research methods….

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Digital Video Editing Tutorial

This looks interesting.

I didn’t know about this:

Once you have gotten the digital video of the film you will be commenting on, you will need to both get the specific clips you want to talk about and compress them. We recommend you use a tool like MPEG Streamclip (PC/Mac). Important: When using a Mac or PC and working with video editing/conversion tools like MPEG Streamclip (or any of the others listed above) it is highly recommend that you make sure to install Perian (for the Mac) or the K-Lite Codec Pack(for the PC)—both of which are free utilities that add a series of codec recognition tools across the various video applications on your computer.

What MPEG Streamclip will allow you to do is select and trim exactly the clips you want to discuss from the longer scenes. Doing this in MPEG Streamclip will save you time and energy before importing it into a video editor like Moviemaker or iMovie, both of which bloat video unnecessarily and take a lot more time and resources to work with. Note that you may have to cut a longer scene up into various clips that you will then edit together in your final version. Also, when converting the clips, make sure they are the same aspect ratio as the original, and that you are saving them in the proper codec for your video editing software. (Note: MPEG Streamclip will convert files to Windows media format.)

Useful Discussion of Video, especially Web Video

From Bob Sacha.

Very interesting points from Bob and others about why we don’t need to follow the conventions of TV news footage.

Especially interesting:

Web video has the distinct advantage of being embedded on a page where it’s literally surrounded by a web of information: text that can describe, summarize and tease, still photos, links to more information or other points of view, graphs, charts, maps, etc, etc.

Misc info from the Calumet sound workshop with Richard Newman

Note that most of this is correct terminology but some is, well, my paraphrases with terms that make more sense to me.

He says that the chain Guitar Workshop has good audio equipment at good prices.  In SF and El Cerrito.

His workflow for video editing:

1-complete the editing in Final Cut – do all the cuts, etc, that you’re going to do before you move on.  [You can do this in iMovie, too.]

2-export the sound from the video to Garage Band [or other audio editing software] where you fix the sound quality,  add sound effects, etc.  [iMovie, obviously, is designed to do this.]  You can’t cut (or expand) either of these or they won’t sync any more, so it’s critical that you don’t do this until you’re completely finished with edits.

3-then re-combine the new sound and the video in Final Cut.  [If you can’t remove  the original audio track in whatever software you use, you can turn the volume down all the way and add the new audio track.]

He uses a dog clicker and keeps the click on both sound and video tracks till the very end –so that he can use it to sync the sound and video.

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Tutorials on Media-Making and Tools

This is linked from our blog but I had forgotten —
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/
They have online tutorials on Final Cut Pro, audio editing including Garage Band and Audacity, Photoshop, Soundslides…and so forth.

There are also tutorials on making media, not just tools.  I skimmed through the one on making video — started really obvious, but had some good advice, points I hadn’t thought about.  I think it’s worth going through their tutorials (which it’s easy to to quickly) for various media, just to see what they may say that you don’t already know. Especially, tof course, for whatever media you plan to use, but others as well.

A way to make web shots interesting

What struck me about these shots — stills from a CNN video — is how they made interesting pictures of what could have been simple shots of websites.  More generally, the point is that it’s worth looking at a lot of visual material to look for ideas about how to make images more interesting.  (Yes, when I’m bored I do watch silly videos, and not all of them are cats.)  The one quoting a Daily Show spokesperson has a video in the background.  Note also that 2 websites used in the same report (PETA and Alliance for Animals) are taken from different perspectives, adding a little more interest to the video.


Instant G Concept Video/ Thoughts on iMovie

I think iMovie is a great tool, especially the newest version iMovie ’11. I’ve been using different versions of iMovie for the last 10 years or so and this one is definitely the most usable and granular in terms of being able to modify your video. I worked with iMovie most recently for a New Product Development course at Hass. Here is a concept movie I filmed on my iPhone 4 and then edited in iMovie ’11.

Video cartoons/images

Here are the video depictions we came up with in class.

-Sean