Projects

"We read to learn and we write for understanding." I'm not sure who to credit for this quote but it is painted on one of the exterior walls at Johnny Cochrane Middle School here in Los Angeles. I used to ponder these words when I would join my District Intern Cohort there every week. Creating this video was a process that involved a lot of reading followed by a lot of writing.

The writing, which helped me to better understand what I read, was followed by creating a visual story. After mining the internet for images and artifacts, I began to work with several creative applications including Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Photoshop, and Audacity. The final construction and some audio work were completed using the Adobe Spark application.

Adobe Spark is user friendly and easy to use. The application is intuitive and the interactive tools are easy to locate. Adobe provides a series of slide layout templates, themes, including user created branding themes, formatting and sizing options, free photos and images, and a very good collection of license free music.

While I enjoyed working on this project I found Adobe Spark lacked sufficient audio recording ability. Recording was tied directly to each slide and therefore several individual voice recordings are necessary when compiling a short video feature. This made it challenging to have the narration sound natural and unrushed. On a positive note, Adobe Spark provides easy timeline manipulation and the ability to customize the amount of time a slide appears.

As a workaround, I created small videos and recorded voice using Audacity before uploading the vignettes to the Spark application.