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Going Behind The Scenes: My iMovie Project About Harper Lees Biography Nicholas S. Portugal West Career & Technical Academy

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Have you ever completed a school assignment using the program iMovie? After creating my first school project using it, I felt that my moviemaking skills improved remarkably. For this project, my classmates and I were required to create an effective iMovie presentation that explained our assigned topics based on the famous novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. My particular topic was on Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, where I researched her biographical information and developed connections between the novel and her life. With iMovies advanced controls and simple interface, I was successfully able to put together an impressive presentation using numerous effects and techniques that greatly assisted me in this process. Here Ill describe my strenuous yet exciting experiences while creating my movie. First, during the arduous process of my movie creation, I used several unique techniques to present Harper Lees biography such as voiceover narration, which contributed to positive results. Voiceover narration allows the user to explain specific slides and information through voice recordings. Moreover, other techniques I utilized successfully included transitional effects and ducking effects, which allow you to decrease the volume on songs and tracks in the background to provide more focus on narration or new audio that cuts in between tracks. For the most important and relevant slides, I included text boxes for brief captions explaining the depicted images. Regarding music and tracks in my movie, I played both Etudes n.1 by Chopin, and Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. The reason I chose classical music is because of the tone of the whole topic and narration, which was rather slow and calmly expressed. I believed that a more slower and calmer tone was suitable for the movie since most other genres such as pop and rock would definitely increase the need to accelerate the slide durations and would intensify its approach tremendously to other people who viewed it. On the other hand, there were a few unsuccessful strategies that didnt present as efficiently as I thought. These included

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vocalization as well as certain slides that appeared to be more time-consuming than others. My vocalization was a bit interesting, because when I heard my voice utter into the microphone, it sounded excellent on my computer, however, when it came to presentation day, it sounded slightly different than my normal voice. When I played the movie, I was concerned that people viewing it wouldnt think I recorded the narration. Likewise, the slides that consumed large durations of time were also unexpected. I didnt watch the movie enough times to notice how some slides played faster than others, though I wish I could have gone back and edited the slide durations to distribute them accordingly with my narration. Harper Lees book reflected her personality significantly because her characteristics represented Scout, the protagonist and narrator of the novel. Also, a great abundance of character names used were taken from her parents names. Her mothers name was Frances Cunningham Finch; which in To Kill A Mockingbird three characters were represented: Ms. Frutti (Real name is Frances), Walter Cunningham, and Atticus Finch. Additionally, Harper Lees fathers name was Amasa Coleman Lee, the name Lee being used for Robert E. Lee Ewell, the antagonist of the story. Consequently, To Kill A Mockingbird was quite relevant to the 21st century because even nowadays, To Kill A Mockingbird still tops the bestseller list for classic American literature, as it did over 40 years ago when it was originally published. It teaches young people about moral values and how Southern life was during the 1930s, but the most important lesson it taught was the moral nature of human beings. Moreover, as I researched connections about To Kill A Mockingbird, I noticed an incredibly moving passage from one of the sites how To Kill A Mockingbird was rated to be the book every adult should read before they die, next to the Bible. Lastly, the most important point in our society we should never forget is that racial equality should be a known fact of life, because even now, there are still some problems involving racial

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inequality but we should understand that everyone was created equally; no one chose to be their race, color, or culture; it was already predestined for all of us. Consequently, my experiences while creating my iMovie were spectacular! I do have a Mac computer at home, so I have prior knowledge and some experience utilizing the program because I create many slideshows and home movies for my family to watch occasionally. The pros about creating my iMovie were that I used an appropriate amount of time to create it. By the time I finished, it was about five days before the deadline, so I had extra time to make final revisions and watch it to catch any potential issues. Conversely, the cons were that when I was making the movie, sometimes the iMovie program would automatically shut down intermittently and I would lose data, so continual retrieval from the websites was time-consuming. If I could do something differently next time, I would probably redo the speed of the movie. It was a bit too slow and exceeded the time length I had planned it to play. Above all, I learned to actually create presentations many other ways, such as iMovies. I would have never thought of doing an iMovie as an alternative project idea on my own. Finally, creating my first actual school assignment on iMovie was incredible. I enjoyed it; having a great time researching my interesting topic, as well as getting the chance to learn how to use all of the great tools iMovie has to offer. As I mentioned before, I would have never come up with using iMovie as an alternative project idea, so learning a new strategy will allow me to create quality presentations as I progress through my high school years. I hope to do this again someday; hopefully for another novel we read in class we can create another iMovie to present it as we did here for Harper Lees masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird. Compared to other students, most who do not own a Mac computer, this project was probably more difficult for them as this was maybe the first time they used iMovie, however, I thought this project was very

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unique and challenging because I love using Mac computers and learning how to use them more productively. Usually, when it comes time to present a book, the English teacher would normally assign a written book report, but since West CTA is an advanced technical school, it felt exciting to create a video as a project. I am so used to writing essays and creating Powerpoints to present books, so to have the opportunity to create a video was a very unique experience that not many students experience. If you had the opportunity, would you create an iMovie to present your future book reports?

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