A place to call home for etec 565

“I want to be a Musician, the story of Jazz musician Marty Franklin”

Click on the word ‘Marty’ to watch my interview.

I started off my Digital Story by wanting to create a set of lessons for my guitar club, in essence, a sort of “how to” to help the students see the big picture in guitar building in digital form. I contacted John about my idea and he politely reminded me that I needed to ‘tell a story.’ I still wanted to create the video for the kids, so I chose to do an interview with a 71 year old Jazz musician who plays vibraphone and piano as my introductory video to the Guitar club. My plan is to get the kids pumped by showing them where music leads to. At the end of the video, there are still images of the teachers I work with and where they have been with their musical talents.

I incorporated into the beginning of the video a comic sketch from Mainada as an introduction to the interview, “I want to be a Musician, the story of Jazz musician Marty Franklin.” Unfortunately, I forgot to crop the introductory jpeg before I loaded to YouTube. My production is fairly simple as I want to keep the format the same when I produce the series for the Guitar program. This ETEC 565 – Mod. 4 exercise is like a pre-cursor to what I want to do later on for the guitar program, kids and the school where I teach. I also tried to incorporate Pixton at the back end of the video, but no luck.

Pick your Story

As mentioned earlier, this video presentation of Jazz musician Marty Franklin, is the first of a series of videos designed to show my Guitar club students. I want the kids to get pumped in realizing they too can become good musicians if they take the time to learn. My video series will be on proper usage of shop equipment and the necessary steps to building a solid body guitar from scratch. Many of these students, who are building guitars, have never taken a shop class before and our concern is that they hurt themselves in the after school Guitar building program.

Explore the Tools

I had lots of fun looking at the creations of Alan LeVine and his Dominoe story. Gave us an early indicator to what the software choices were about. A very useful way to realize software potential through the eyes of someone else. Problem with me is… too much to choose from. I decide on cartoon script to introduce Marty the Jazz musician, I wanted to keep it light hearted. I used Mainada for the introduction at the front of the video and Pixton for the back end, unfortunately, I could not load Pixton to the tail end properly.

Pick a Tool any Tool

To enhance my video, I tried Mainada in the introduction. This tool I found somewhat cumbersome and clunky to use. I’ve used AutoCadd for years and tried to fake my way through Mainada and realized it’s limitations very soon, but had also spend quite some time with it and realized time was running out. I unfortunately, forgot to crop the image before loading to YouTube.  Some of the words at the bottom are not seen.

The video was QuickTime Movie edited on iMovie.  I certainly found out that live video can be a complicated and time consuming process. My old friend Marty messed up a couples times and we had to start from scratch. Then it was my turn to make a mistake or two. Needless to say, live video taping has it’s hidden secrets. Still, I chose this form of media presentation as it will allow me to develop the “how to” videos for my students in an easy to view and understand format. It gives me the opportunity to show, stop and speak to the kids. Because Safety is a major concern, seeing me actually standing and cutting a piece of wood in the video is much better than a still shot and explanation.

I tried to cap off my video using Pixton, great little cartoon script, but I could not figure out how to retract from the Pixton website and save to my folder. My three page clip can be seen “HERE.” On the downside, unless someone knows better, Pixton clips need to be viewed at the Pixton web site.

A short reflection

I chose YouTube as the host of my story telling approach so the Guitar Club kids can view the lessons at any time and I can challenge them, whether they watched the video or not, on the actual guitar building day, usually Wednesdays. Someone mentioned compartmentalize somewhere… because of the hands on nature of the guitar club, many times we need to stop and look back at what we have done and why, or look forward to what we are going to do and ask why?

As students will be at different stages of their guitar building career, it is often hard to keep them all on task when they need our help. Often, there will only be one teacher helping another student. This creates a gap in learning for the others. At times, a student may be ill or cannot make a Wednesday session, and needs to play catch-up upon return. The “how to” videos will be very useful as a re-fresher or introduction to the next step.

Lastly, many other ‘outside the district’ teachers are interested in our Guitar Club. We are establishing a “Community of Practice.” Shop teachers from around the province are starting to contact us and it only makes sense to show them our program via YouTube. A short segment I produced for 531 is located “HERE” on “Am I an Artist?” In essence, the collaborative efforts by the three Guitar making teachers at Delta Secondary are becoming known with shop teachers in the province and we need to develop a wheel to help deliver our passion for teaching the craft of Guitar building.

thank you, ddp