Azinger Again

Having watched my photostory 174 times in the last two days, I have come to realize the problem with my use of fair use. By limiting each of my segments to 10% of the original song, things felt pretty fast–even for me. If I would have used cc music (creative commons, not c&c music factory), I could’ve had a longer fade out at the end of the flim; I could’ve taken a little more time with the intro.

However, it’s enough of a challenge to find just the song to create just the right mood when looking through my own music library, I can’t imagine doing it with songs I’ve never heard before. If I ever become a famous musician, I’ll make sure to take the copyright off of my music after the first 18 months. I bet record companies would love to have me .

I’ve been chuckling to myself this last week about photostorytelling. I’ve wanted to do it for longer than I can remember–initially learning about it from a colleague. She presented it to the staff, and talked about how simple it was to just throw a couple of pictures and some open source music together…and viola! You have a photostory.

My journey has been a little different this week. It hasn’t been terribly difficult, but it has taken so much more time than I ever would have expected, especially thinking back on the person who introduced it to me. It was all in good fun though, since I chose a story about my son and I. I spent the week looking through old pictures and videos, scanning appropriate music, and getting ever more familiar with iMovie and Audacity. There was something romantic about sifting through my digital photo albums while the rest of my family slept–and something fun about crawling into bed with 15 months of baby pics in my head.

Since it has consumed me, I couldn’t help but think about education as well–specifically how this could be used in education. As an English teacher, the obvious answer is to tell a narrative. However, I couldn’t help thinking about how media and literacy are constantly flexing and morphing, and began to envision a persuasive piece written as a photostory: an argument read underneath a series of images and film clips; images flashing across a screen while a debate happens in the background. Even an expository piece could happen here: use photos as notecards, and topic sentences, and read your essay while images engage the class. The amount of writing and revision I had to do for this project was incredible, and made it easy to see this fit into almost any writing piece I could think of.

Enough out of me. Here’s my first ever photo story, created in iMovie with full advantage taken of Fair Use Guidelines. Peace.