For our midterm for Inquiry we were asked to make a video. This blog is basically a progress report on how it’s going. Our professor gave us the topic of critical thinking. I decided to expand on that idea a bit by asking people how critical thinking has helped improve their lives. I love learning new things, but it’s kind of pointless unless it can be applied to real life (that’s just my opinion). So I went around and asked a few people what they thought critical thinking was and how it has helped them in their academic pursuits and social lives.

 Unfortunately, I didn’t get the desired results from my first two participants. I asked three friends from high school (that are also freshmen at Southern) to help me out with the movie. One friend flat out refused to be interviewed (even after I told her she didn’t have to be filmed). Luckily, my other two friends agreed to be in the video. I could tell they were very nervous, so I tried my best to calm them down. I told them to relax, have fun and to just be themselves. I wanted personal answers; their own voices, experiences, etc. What I got was the generic text book answer for each question I asked. I tried to get them to be looser by asking more follow up questions, but you’ll see later on in the video that it just wasn’t happening. I gave up when one of my interviewees (if that’s even a word) got confused by the word “perspective”. After that I kind of just gave up and shot whatever they said. But don’t worry, I have scheduled more interviews and hopefully I can get more life from the others.

We have to have a rough draft done for Thursday so we can all watch each other’s progress and get feedback. And this is where my second dilemma arises. I have never made a movie before and I have no idea what I’m doing. So I downloaded windows movie maker and imported my video. Set it up in a nice little timeline, but I have no idea how to add slides in between the clips. Also, when I play the video I have audio but no visual. This could be a problem since people usually watch videos as well as listen. I spent about 3 hours last night trying to get it to work and I made no progress. I almost threw my laptop against the wall.

Just as I was beginning to feel hopeless my friend Katie comes to the rescue. With all of this stress I forgot that Katie took video courses all throughout high school and could probably help me. So, this morning we met up and she took a look at my video. She said the version I downloaded was extremely old and she wasn’t sure how to work it. But alas, all hope is not lost. We’re meeting up in the computer room in the student center to see if we can get it to work on one of those computers. I hope this works because if not I’ll have nothing to show tomorrow in class. Keep your fingers crossed.

……Will I be able to get my video to work properly? Will I be able to spice up my video and get more exciting and personal answers? You’ll find out in two weeks when I post my video onto my blog *cue dramatic soap opera music*