Day in a Day Video
Well we did it! A group of eight children from years 3, 4 and 6 filmed and edited a video that captured a day in the life of Sussex Road School. The whole process took place over the course of one day – Tuesday 4th July 2006. To watch the video click HERE.
‘Day in a Day’ was an idea that came to me about 6 months or more ago. It was intended to be a focussed task which would allow the children and staff involved in the project to use the skills they had learned over the last year or so.
I will talk you through our experiences:
Two of the pupils came in early to find out what school was like without the children.
We couldn’t face getting in at 6:30 am when the caretaker opens the school, choosing instead a more sociable 8:00 am. It was a rather rude awakening for the children though that were expected to be sharp, lively and ready to speak up, either directly to camera or to lead interviews. I don’t think we missed anything much by starting the day a bit later.
The children were obviously nervous at the start of the day. Nervous about being on camera, nervous about going into rooms that they wouldn’t usually roam into freely, and nervous about jumping out on staff to interview them. They warmed to it eventually though.
The equipment performed well and the Mac mini edited around an hour and a half’s worth of footage down to the final 7.5 minutes with ease. The only time that we had to wait for it to do its bit was when the final video was compressed for publication. (More on that later)
The battery on the DV camera showed a rather low charge frighteningly soon after starting filming. We made sure it was switched off as soon as actual filming was complete. The camera managed to last on this basis until just after break time at 10:30.
This was when we started to transfer the recorded footage onto the Mac mini. DV video transfers via a Firewire connection at real time, so this part of the process took around 25-30 minutes. The camera was plugged back into the mains for this time (Though I don’t think it actually charges until it is in the ‘off’ position).
We were lucky that we had a second DV camera – one with a high capacity battery. This one made sure that we always had a camera capable of filming.
You should allow for a time to charge the DV camera at times when you are capturing the day by other means – such as with a stills camera to produce a slide show of still images.
The lunch-time filming was condensed by using iStopMotion and the Mac mini to film time lapse images. We set it to one frame capture every 60 seconds. We could have got away with it being more frequent than that to lengthen the final footage. As it was an hour and a half was condensed to around 3 and a bit seconds. The children were amazed with the final effect.
The end of school came and went and the children worked on. They were having to be quite brutal with the editing, trying to keep the best bits and discard the rest. It got to the stage where they were cutting stray seconds from clips in the hope that they could get to the target length of 5 minutes without losing too much of the meaning. We decided to call it a day when we had reached 7.5 minutes as to have taken more away would have really changed the balance of the video.
The children stopped work at 4:30.
I continued working for a further hour to look for stray seconds in need of trimming. After finding a mere handful I set the video to compress for QuickTime publication.
Rather than settling for one of the preset options, I opted for the expert export. This allows you to get the higher quality video without affecting the file size too much.
The options I took were:
Size - 320 x 240 pixels
Codec – H 264, medium quality, Prepared for streaming & fast start.
The titles are readable using these options and the picture is much crisper than you would get from one of the presets.
H 264 takes a long time to encode. We are talking beyond the half an hour that was available before the caretaker locked up
Although the final file was huge at around 100Mb, the video plays without fail on a broadband connection – without much of a wait at all to get started.
It was an enjoyable day and the children learned an awful lot.