I know you probably came here today to read some hilarious installments of my WLE blog. But there is something serious I must discuss first. It's a problem that is plaguing the world over, and there doesn't seem to be an end. I'm speaking, of course, of lazy blog prompts.
This afternoon, I checked my school website to see the prompt I was supposed to respond to. This is what I found:
What academic or leadership skills does your WLE require from you? Provide detailed examples.
That's it? That's all you could come up with? I remember when the blog prompts filled me with unbridled terror and hatred for their very existence. I mean, just look at week 4. Now that was a prompt! I avoided that thing for who knows how long. Now, I'm not saying I support these things, in fact, I wish we never had to respond to a prompt. I'd much rather ramble freely about what I feel like (much like what I'm doing now). But if you go through all the effort to conjure up these demon spawn, at least make them worthwhile.
Now to answer your question: critical thinking, creative expression, and productive collaboration. Critical thinking has definitely been useful for developing my videos. I have to constantly figure out if the layout and shots are good at selling the product. Creative expression is always present in video, since it's sort of an art form to begin with. And of course, like in most businesses, collaborating productively is a must. Unless you're running things by yourself, you need to be able to work well with your co-workers. Otherwise, there's no telling if you'll get the product you want.
Phew. Now that that's out of the way, here's the week 6 update!
Today was definitely more of a day of discovery and experimentation than a day of production. I ended up taking a little break from Final Cut and explored some more of the mysterious After Effects. I was able to stumble my way to a very basic placeholder graphic. It had the entire Get Clean product line crawling by with a banner containing the Get Clean logo underneath. Then....you ready for this? A light sweep goes over the logo. Yes, yes I know. My innovative genius was able to make the logo shimmer for a brief moment.
Later, Tom was able to set aside some time and gave me a crash course in the program. I'm definitely more comfortable with the interface now, and I know some useful tricks as well. I went back and tinkered with my animation to see how I could spice it up. Get this! Now the banner sweeps in and the logo appears, and freaking light shines and these cool rays are everywhere and stuff...Forget it. You can't even describe it. It's too mind blowing. I'll just have to screen cap it.
Now that's pretty freaking epic.
I'm curious if I can get a copy of After Effects for myself. I'm not sure how I could incorporate it with any MSAT work, but I think it'd be good to have. A nice accompaniment to all the other Adobe stuff on my laptop at home.
And so, the day continued as I explored the endless possibilities of After Effects. BUT THEN...Joan appeared and a new path was forged. A path...of budgets. Sexy, sexy budgets. We headed on over to her cubicle and she brought out a template spreadsheet. Apparently when doing budgets, they always start out with the basic one and then add and subtract based on the particular project. I was actually surprised by some of the figures. Under the art/animation category, she labeled 2D and 3D animators as roughly $1200/day and $1500/day respectively. Looks like I'm getting into the right business.
After looking at the costs of each little thing, a bunch of calculations go on at the bottom regarding the projected cost, price per unit, and other fun stuff. It was a nice mini lesson that I'm sure can easily be expanded upon. Now I can rest easy knowing that if I ever run into a wall with the whole video editing thingamajigger, I'll always have budgets to keep me entertained. Speaking of resting, that sounds pretty good right now. Let's see if I've written enough...Oh yeah. This is plenty. In fact, I think you got more than I intended. You should thank me for writing all of this!
You know, I should really start charging for subscriptions to this thing.
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