Respect Your Audience – a minor rant

I’ve been watching tutorials for MS Movie Maker. A few of them are produced by Microsoft; but many are produced by user gurus and wannabe gurus. I classify some as “wannabes” because while their knowledge of the product is very good, their presentation skills, well, just plain suck.  Has our culture become so casual that a sloppy presentation manner is thought to be acceptable? 

One individual has produced several Movie Maker tutorials.  I’ve watch two of them and the video presentation is good; but I won’t watch any more of his work because of his careless and unedited narrative.

He burps. He sniffs. It even sounds like he blows his nose. UGH!!!  I can’t listen to him. This man is a social moron! (I did say it is a rant.)

I know that there are many tutorials on many subjects that are very well done by user gurus so I’m not condemning them all  Just the few who have no respect for others.

<<End of Rant>>

And I did manage to get my two StoryPress stories converted to YouTube videos.

War Baby on YouTube

https://youtu.be/B6nAXnUwd88

Schipp in Prussian Poland

https://youtu.be/ec4UMAIaU6w

Another Story Published

My new favorite medium for publishing family history stories is Storypress.com  It is incredibly easy to use. It’s still work to develop the story and find the right images, but it is an order of magnitude easier than doing the same thing for a Youtube video.

The biggest problem is my narration – voice, enunciation, and delivery.  I haven’t won a lottery yet, so I can’t afford to hire a professional reader. And I cannot seem to produce a narration that is more than just adequate. It eventually gets to the point where it’s either publish or go on redoing and revising forever. So it is done – for now.

This story is about my great grandparents Michael and Elizabeth Schipp in Prussian Poland.   You can find it here.  If you watch it, I’ll appreciate your comments and suggestions for improvement

On to the next project

I’m a Producer!

I’m a producer – and a legend in my own mind.

I finally finished my first attempt at my first family history video.  It was a challenge. The subject is one set of my great grandparents while they lived in Poland.

Challenge:

Visual content.  There are no photographs of them from that time and, of course, no moving pictures.  I chose images of them that I’d cropped from a later family portrait.  They’re fuzzy, but they’re all I have.  I captured Google Earth images of their home towns  I used photos of the ships on which they arrived in the US.

Challenge:

Script.  I never knew these ancestors so my knowledge comes from oral family history and from documents found during my research.  I also wanted to include a bit of history to put their lives in Poland in context. I ended up modifying the script as I recorded it.

Challenge:

Video software. I’d heard of free software called Movie Maker from Microsoft.  My expectation was that it would be very basic and pretty user friendly. Not for this user.  The download includes no documentation and I could find no “help” button. It was extremely frustrating.

So I dug out my 10 year old Adobe Premier Elements hoping that it would run on Windows 7. It does. It is very user friendly, and it has excellent help and tutorials.

Challenge:

Timing.  I’d learned that 6 minutes is a good upper limit for time.  It turned out that I had so little visual content that it came in at 3 minutes.

Challenge:

Audio software.  Here I was very lucky.  I found free software called Audacity.  It is very highly rated and although it has features needed by professionals, it is extremely easy to use for those of us who know nothing about the intricacies of sound recording.  It comes with excellent documentation.

Challenge:

Recording:  Do I speak clearly enough?  How’s my voice modulation and pacing?  Etc. etc. etc.  I recorded in segments and for reasons I don't yet understand,  the sound level is not equal across them all.  I'll have to learn more about using the software to ensure uniform sound levels.

In the end, I actually came up with a 3 minute video that I’m willing to show to a few other people, but not the whole world.  I’ll show it to those who, I believe, will give it a fair evaluation so that I can make improvements.

I’ll definitely do more like this.  I’m a producer!!

Video Project Progress

What an education this has been.  I backed off of my original concept and instead am working on a short video about one set of my great grandparents.  I'd originally thought that it would be easiest to use as subjects, the family I know least about.  Couldn't get past square 1.5.

Movie Maker is free from Microsoft.  It is relatively new and I thought that MS would provide very user friendly basic video software.  Wrong. Not for me. I struggled trying to figure it out and finally gave up.  Instead I reloaded my 10 year old Adobe Premier Elements. It was written for Windows XP so I kept my fingers crossed that it would work on Windows 7. It does.  I don't even know if Adobe makes an "Elements" version of Premier anymore.

I also learned just how important it is to do a storyboard - something I'd had no experience with. Some internet research helped a lot and I found a free storyboard template that uses MS Word.

This is a Ken Burns kind of project. I have no actual video footage,  It will be a series of graphics and still pictures with my narration.

This project will cover only the time from 1850 when my great grandfather was born, to 1887 when the family emigrated from Poland to the United States. And I really know nothing about their lives in Poland.  It should be less than 5 minutes long.

It has taken much longer than I expected to select the visuals.  If time wasn't an issue, it might have been easier to just include everything I've found, but I don't like videos longer than 5 minutes so that's my limit..

Script writing has also been a challenge.  How to I tell a reasonable short story?  What is important information and what isn't.  Can I make it interesting? Probably not.

Next step is to record the narration. That scares me.  How is my voice quality?  Can I speak clearly enough and naturally enough?

When I finish, will I have the guts to let anyone else  see it?

Time will tell.

This is more complex than I thought

I’ve started on the YouTube project I mentioned in a previous post. Lured by the ease of use of Microsoft Movie Maker, I dived right in.  Problem is that planning the video is the hard part.  My first effort will be for my eyes only – just an experiment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s simple.

First, decide which line to start with.  I picked the one for which I have the least information because I thought that would make for easier decisions on content – not too much to choose from.  I’m rethinking that decision.

Starting with a mind map using XMind (free software), I laid out the kind of content to include.  Very simple for my first project.

I have no old photos because this is not my family – its my children’s paternal heritage.  So I went off looking for old photos of Prague. Not very many that don’t have full copyright restrictions.  Then I looked for old photos of late 19^th century Chicago which was much easier.  I’ll use images of census documents to show the families.

The next step would be a script, or so I thought.  Actually the next step is a storyboard.  I just use an outline for planning the flow of the video.  It’s not complex enough to need a true storyboard.

Then I started a script.  This is not as simple as just writing.  I tend to be pretty wordy, and I have a time constraint so scripting is a challenge.  I wonder how many versions will be created before I get one that will work.  I’m using Marlis Humphrey’s guidelines for a video which means it should run no longer than 6 minutes.  Mine will be much shorter than that partly because I’m having trouble coming up with the right narration content; and partly because I don’t like watching videos that are more than 3 or 4 minutes long.

Getting my mind around this has been a challenge.

So I’m thinking of shelving this project and doing my first attempt using one of my own lines.  Maybe it will be more comfortable working with the ancestors I know the most about.  Will having more material make it more difficult?  Hope not.

So I’m off to start another mind map.

Going off on a tangent

I am starting a publishing project – that is “modern” publishing - and taking a break from serious researching.

Marlis Humphrey  www.myAncestories.com was the speaker at the September meeting of Indian River Genealogy Society. Marlis is nationally recognized as an expert on publishing family histories. She presented at the most recent RootsTech and has been invited to present again at the next one.

Marlis defines publishing in a broad context with the emphasis on getting the target audience to pay attention and actually enjoy the content.  This means that books are pretty much at the bottom of her list of how to communicate our research results to our families, including the youngest members of the family.

Like many family historians, I’ve embarked on a few very wordy narrations of what I’ve discovered.  Even if I added photos, it would be rather dull reading for most people.

Marlis’ presentation was on using electronic media to tell our family stories. Our grandchildren, nieces and nephews are more attuned to the visual.

Probably the most straight forward of these would be a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over audio added. 

The most complex would be an electronic magazine using software such as Issuu or Flipboard.

I’m going to try creating a movie for YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily mean using a video camera to produce content.  Marlis asks us to think of the wonderful work of Ken Burns.  Some of his documentaries easily contain more still photos than actual video footage.  What a concept!  She showed us a few examples of what others have done with this idea.

Movie Maker is free software from Microsoft.  It looks very easy to use so that’s my choice, not to mention the “free”part.

It’s going to be a challenge, but it should be fun.