Varsity's Play

     Windows Movie Maker is a video editing program included in Microsoft Windows that allows users to easily edit and develop videos/ movies. Making a movie using Windows Movie Maker can be divided into three easy steps: import, edit, and publish.

     When using Windows Movie Maker, you first import the videos or pictures you wish to use to make your movie. Then you arrange them in the order you would like them to play on the timeline at the bottom of the screen.

     The next step is to edit. There are several ways you can edit: split and combine clips, trim a video clip, add transitions between clips, add effects to parts of your movie, or add titles in certain parts of your movie. By adding transitions between clips, a transition controls how your movie plays from one video clip/ picture to the next. There are several different types of transitions and the transition length is determined by the overlap of the 2 clips. Effects on the other hand are special effects you apply to the clips. There are also several different choices for these special effects. You may also want to add a title, or titles, to your movie. Windows Movie Maker allows you to do this by giving you the option of putting a title anywhere you would like. You can also add special effects to these titles to add character to your movie.

     The final step in completing a movie on Windows Movie Maker is to publish it. When you finish working on a project, you can publish the project as a movie. You can share your movie with others in a number of ways—through your computer, on a recordable CD, as an attachment in an e‑mail message, or on videotape in a DV camera. And Ta Da! You’re finished!

     Windows Movie Maker has been in existence for about 9 years now. It was first created in 2000 with Windows Millennium.  This version, version 1.0, was much simpler and had more basic features than the most recent version on Windows 7. There are 8 versions of Windows Movie Maker in all:

-          2000 : Windows Movie Maker 1.0 (Windows Me)

-          2001 : Windows Movie Maker 1.1 (Windows XP)

-          2002 : Windows Movie Maker 2.0 (Windows XP)

-          2004 : Windows Movie Maker 2.1 (Windows XP SP2)

-          2004 : Windows Movie Maker 2.5 (Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005)

-          2006 : Windows Movie Maker 2.6 (Windows Vista)

-          2007 : Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (Windows Vista)

-          2009: Windows Movie Maker 7.0 (Windows 7)

     When Windows Movie Maker was first introduced to users, it was not really given too much attention because of the lack of special features it had compared to the iMovie (for Macs.) These shortcomings were realized and Microsoft decided to upgrade WMM in 2001 with version 1.1 which debuted with Windows XP. Version 1.1 featured DV AVI and WMV 8 video files creation.  In 2002, another free upgrade that included many new features was given to users called Windows Movie Maker 2. This was again updated in 2004 with WMM 2.1 and integrated in Windows XP SP2. Next, version 2.5 arrived, released in the same year which came with Windows XP Media Center Edition. This version featured additional transition effects as well as DVD burning functionality. Then in 2006, Windows Vista was released, along with another new version of WMM. This time the video making program came with even more features including new effects and transitions. A year later, Windows Movie Maker 6.0 was released. This version of the program supported DVR-MS and also has added support for HD video format. WWM6 came with a capture wizard that creates DVR-MS type files from HDV tapes. Most recently, a new version of WMM on Windows 7 has just been released. This version includes a new layout and many special effects the older versions did not have. Knowing Microsoft’s track record with this program, another version with new improvements is bound to come out soon!

     Like I mentioned earlier, there has been a debate about whether iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is the better video editing program. I read many blog posts and various other articles about this topic. The most repeated statements that kept appearing were these: “iMovie is too complicated; Windows Movie Maker is much simpler,” “Windows Movie Maker doesn’t have as many effects as iMovie does; iMovie is much better”, “Both are good programs and easy to use for being free.” My conclusion from these many arguments is that both programs are appreciated by users because they are free yet valuable. If you are looking for a simple program to make a basic video then Windows Movie Maker is your key. If you are looking to do more special effects and add “bling” to your video then iMovie is for you. It’s all about user preference.

     Unlike with film used in the film industry, when a user makes a movie using a medium such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie “…an edit doesn’t cause a physical change,” as Dr. C pointed out. With these free programs, special effects are much easier to add and scenes are much easier to tweak. Like Bill Viola says, “Life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting.” In Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space, Viola, a high-profile video artist, encouraged artists to create “defamiliarizing forms of interaction” that would benefit the advancement of technology and possibly create new mediums.  Viola says that digital computers and software technologies are holistic, which by definition means “thinking as something as a whole; not by the many parts that make up the whole.” WMM is holistic software that can take complete videos and turn that medium into parts by adding them together making one long video like I did for my project. Or, it can take one video and break it into parts and edit them one by one turning them into something completely different.  

     Just like McCloud was able to write a comic about writing comics, I attempted to make a movie about making a movie using the new medium Windows Movie Maker. Like McCloud, I discuss the various features of my medium. He portrays the ways comics can be changed and altered to mean different things. Editing film or video can also have the same effects. Lengthening a box can mean more time is passing by in a comic; in film, a longer scene can also be edited to also portray that time is passing by. By adding special effects to video using mediums like WMM, you can make a video look like it is from a different time period, being filmed underwater, etc. Editing a comic relates in many ways to editing film because these alters can result in different meanings of the overall message of the medium.  

     This project turned out to be more complicated then I had originally thought. I had to film myself making a movie on Windows Movie Maker. I then had to make another movie using WMM to show myself making a movie. I ended up with 2 movies. The first shows how to make a movie using Windows Movie Maker, and the second is the movie I actually made (which is a movie describing WMM’s history.) So, in conclusion, I made a movie using Windows Movie Maker about making a movie using Windows Movie Maker about Windows Movie Maker. Whew. Complicated.

My Video: Windows Movie Maker

This essay was intended to give the reader of what the World Wide Web is, what it does compared to other systems, and what the future holds for it.

These authors say that the “World Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.” The Web we know today is definitely a pool of human knowledge and millions of humans share their knowledge and ideas every single day (sometimes with a common project….)

They then go on to describe what W3 defines. The first is Universal Resource Identifiers which “…are the strings used as addresses of objects on the Web.” The second is Hypertext Transfer Protocol, known more conventionally to us as “HTTP” which we see every time we get on the internet at the top of our browser. HTTP is ‘…a protocol for transferring information with the efficiency necessary for making hypertext jumps.” This data can be anything from images to just text. Following HTTP, the authors explain HTML. This came from the Web’s need of a common basic language for hypertext. HTML became that language and a lot of the Web was constructed from it.

The rest of the essay is comparing W3 to other systems and then the future of the Web. Regarding the future, in 1994 the Web was already a place of communication and learning, along with a marketplace, but it was not as easy to read and update as the designers would have liked it to be. They had many hopes for the future including a “easy-to-use servers for low-end machines to ease publication of information by small groups and individuals” among many other things. Since then, any human can confirm that the Web has improved light years in compared to what it was when it first began. The fact is that the Web is amazing; we talk about its uses and benefits every day in class. There’s way too many to list in one blog.

This incredible diversity of information that we have access to at the tip of our fingers and the promise of better technology in the future gives us a very good reason to be excited about what’s going to be available next.

This essay was basically a reading on how video games have gradually assimilated into our lives and “have become a part of the cultural landscape.”

Now, I must admit I am not a very big video game player. Sure, I play the traditional Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Sports, etc. but I have never felt the desire to take the time to play a game on my computer or a console. So in this respect, much of the things Turkle mentions are new to me.

In the second section “The Myth of the ‘Mindless’ Addiction, Turkle compared video games and television. Not having played very many video games, I too thought they were very similar until she argued against that option. “Television is something you watch. Video games are something you do, something you do to your head, a world that you enter, and, to a certain extent, they are something you ‘become.’” She also says “…Video games are interactive computer micro worlds.” However, being very familiar with TV and movies I have to argue with her on a couple of her points. When Turkle says that video games are “something you do to your head, a world that you enter”, I have to argue that television and cinema can also have this effect. Why do you think people become frightened at scary movies? Because in their minds they are right beside the main character who is walking into the pitch black basement. While movies and shows on television aren’t interactive like video games, they still can allow a person to be in another world.

Turkle mentions several benefits of video games throughout the essay. “There is learning how to learn” (recursion!), while a player generalizes the strategies of a game after the game is mastered (which takes deciphering the logic, understanding the game designer’s intent, etc.) The patterns you pick up have to be more then memorized for this to happen, and Turkle says “…in a way it is beyond thinking.” Another benefit is “The video world knows no such bounds.” This reminded me of Lucasfilm’s Habitat because that world also did not have constraints such as the real world has. People can feel confident and powerful, relaxed and concentrated, or competitive and driven just by playing a video game. These may be some of the best feelings a human can have but some are unable to find them in the real world. Video games have now given these people that pleasure.

There are negative sides to video games however. Like the reader sees in the story of Jarish, he feels cut off from the real world because most of his time is spent in the computerized world. I wrote a paper in 8th grade about the effects of video games on kids and this was one of the main consequences. These kids also benefit from mastering the video games like Turkel mentions, but there are definitely negative side effects. You can “lose oneself.” Just like in 1984, today there is an infatuation with simulated worlds that some people discover and start to prefer them to the real.

Woah!

     I have to admit that I never saw that one coming, but I was thrilled that the story ended that way. The whole time while Bishop was contemplating if he was a puppy or not, I was totally convinced that that was the Kimonians’ plan all along. It made perfect sense…. Until he contradicted it…. And then his new explanation made even more sense.

     But, Dr. C asked us to explain why Maxine is so terrified of what she is learning to do. My initial thought was that she was scared because like Bishop said “You are so terribly afraid of being laughed at.” I think maybe she had accepted the puppy dog theory that their purpose on Kimon is to be “play things” and that hurt her pride. So when she teleported the glass she had dropped she convinced herself that it was the Kimonian’s teasing her again and she decided to try to be “the wise guy” instead of falling for their prank and being humiliated.

     Like Bishop states, “There is only one thing that will crack this planet and that is humility.” Bishop learned to accept his role as a child in order to benefit from what the Kimonians wanted to teach him. Maxine, however, is missing the point and is frightened by the knowledge of things she’s learning to do by just picking them up.

     I feel like I’m missing something though. Sure, the reason I stated may be the reason she is scared, but I feel like there is a deeper explanation (like there always is in this class :p.) I will read my classmates’ blogs to see what their thoughts are.

P.S.- I apologize to Dr. C and Arpit for only reading 3/4 ths of the story!

Windows Movie Maker

1.      Make something in new media

a.      Make a movie in Windows Movie Maker about making a movie

b.      Use all tools provided

        i.      professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, music, narration, etc.

2.      Discuss and analyze the medium you’re working in, including its history, the way in which it’s new media, and how it connects with at least two of the essays we read in class.

a.      http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx

b.      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Movie_Maker

c.       http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Getting-started-with-Windows-Movie-Maker

d.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZXK68NS7gU

e.      Relate to McCloud essay (711)

f.        Relate to Laurel (563) or Kay and Goldberg (391)

3.      Present your work orally, and in a written analysis to be posted to your blog.

a.      Present: show movie

b.   Blog     

      i. History

         ii.      How it’s considered new media

        iii.      Connect with essays

I’ve noticed a lot of essays related to computers and education in this book….

This one, however, was very interesting in that it caught my attention in the very first paragraph: “The computer programming the child…. The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think.” This totally makes sense to me. In my experience, I have always learned something better when I taught it to other people as well as to myself. Like Papert says, because the child is doing something active with the computer the knowledge becomes a source of power.

     There  is also some recursion present in this piece : “I began to see how children who had learned to program computers could use very concrete computer models to think about thinking and to learn about learning and in doing so, enhance their powers as psychologists and as epistemologists.” (I had to look up epistemologist- a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.) I found this interesting that a computer can have this much impact on a child’s thinking.

The main thing I got from this piece was that the school system is most likely not going to change; or at least not for a very long time. Like Illich said, “… everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect.” That effect is to keep things the way they are- familiar. Any change that is out of the ordinary would ruin the system we have had for centuries, even though it may not be the best system. Illich mentions the Chinese had to change their learning system (downgrade it) to have the same structure as the western countries in order to become a world power.

In class we talked about school as a medium. We were asked “What is the message of school?” It turns out the answer is somewhere along the lines of “Keep on doing what society has been doing; don’t change anything.” I think that’s odd in a world like ours today when everything is constantly changing; and a big part of that change is due to new technology. “…This means that to hope for fundamental change in the school system as an effect of conventionally conceived social or economic change is also an illusion. Moreover, this illusion grants the school-the reproductive organ of a consumer society-almost unquestioned immunity.”

In the beginning, using Second Life was seriously frustrating. I had no idea where to go, no idea what to do, and no motivation to try to understand any of it. But, as I spent more time with it and after we used it in class on Thursday, my mindset was totally changed. I found it amazing that even though our class was all over campus, and with Dr. C in Barcelona…., we were still able to look and interact with each other (even with technical difficulties.) To me it was still a bit difficult to use, but I eventually figured it out (EXCEPT I STILL CANT GET THAT STUPID SKIRT OFF!)

It reminded me of Skype a little bit in the sense that you can talk and see each other, but with Second Life you can do so much more, even though it’s not the person’s real face you re looking at.

We only got to talk about the McLuhan piece for about 5 minutes though…. Definitely not a sufficient amount of time for me to be able to understand everything he is talking about. Like we stated in the beginning, this is a very wordy and difficult piece to understand and I know I can not disect it by myself. Maybe we’ll discuss it further on Tuesday….

Therefore, I’ll just quote the parts I underlined:

     – “When the perverse ingenuity of man has outered some part of his being in material technology, his entire sense ration is altered…. In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it.”

     – “…through the development of the mass press, especially the telegraph press, that poets found the artistic keys to the world of simultaneity, or of modern myth.”

     – “Our liberation from the dilemma may come from the new electric technology, with its profound organic character.”

    - “But it is necessary to understand the power and thrust of technologies to isolate the senses and thus to hypnotize society,”

Frist of all, I have to start off by saying that I really enjoyed this essay. Like the Time Frames piece, it was different than just the standard essays about computers and new media most of our reading assignments have been about. This essay incorporated theatre and computer games and how they are related and I found that really interesting.

Laurel says that human-computer activity can be described in a similar model to Aristotle’s model that “creates a disciplined way of thinking about the design of a play in both constructing and debugging activities.” Apparently theatre and film have been moving towards increasing audience participation and involvement, and Laurel thinks computer games have served as a model for this. I really enjoy movies and theatre, but not so much video games, so I thought it was cool how these two forms of new media play off and benefit each other.

Maybe I’ll use this idea for my final project somehow.