Gramping, Learning My New Computer And Software - Testing iMovie - The Wind

There are two grandkids here now.  That's a big distraction.  The older one and I mixed bread dough today.  She paid very close attention and we didn't make too much of a mess.  This is a very simple recipe from a Josey Baker bread book I got at the library - just flour, salt, yeast, and water.  But it does call for it to rise at least three hours and then spend the night in the refrigerator.  So maybe all the fermenting will give it interesting tastes.

I'm also getting used to how to do things on Yosemite (the new Mac operating system) and figuring out how to find things in the various other updated software. iMovie is proving a longer haul - partly because I have about 30 minutes of interview with Attila Szász, the director of The Ambassador to Bern which will show in the Anchorage International Film Festival in December.  So I'm transcribing it and figuring out how I want to edit it.  Part of it is a discussion of taking a real historical event and then fictionalizing it.

It was taking so long that I decided to just make a short video from start to finish - it saves video in different ways that I'm trying to get my head around - just to do one.  It was windy this morning when I woke up, so I took a picture of the evergreen out the window blowing in the wind.

The windows here muffled the sound pretty well, so I looked for some wind sound effects - found 'cave and wind' - and I also tried out the video effects.  The video is short, but look at the difference between the raw footage (what I normally would have used with the old iMovie I was using) and the enhanced video with the added sound.





This is a little related to the discussion of taking a real event and fictionalizing it.  For creative film makers, this offers lots of possibilities: the enhanced mood of the video effects and the sound of wind from the sound effects tools.  But when you compare the beginning few seconds to the second part, you can see the dangers of this sort of editing for people putting up the news.  It's easy to make the video far more exciting than what it really was.  Of course, everyone knows this, but I haven't had such easy access to such smooth and easy enhancements.

So, as you watch video on tv or online, look for whether you're seeing what the camera caught or what the editing room wrought.