Final Entry- The Effects of Experiential Learning
I am one hundred percent a hands-on learner. I have been able to learn so much more from recent experiential learning than I ever can while being lectured to. There’s so much more information that we can take in when doing things on our own instead of just listening to somebody talk. When in a lecture class, there are just a few points that need to be made, but it takes so much to get to those few points. When learning experientially we have revelations, an “ah-ha!” moment if you will. Instead of someone telling me what I am supposed to know in so many more words than it should take, in experiential learning I find the “point” I need to learn, and get there as quickly as possible.
From building my About.me page, my Linkedin page, my blog, purchasing my domain name and getting my website to resolve, making social media pages for my company (Facebook and Twitter), and creating new content to put on my site, I was pretty much on my own when it came to figuring out how to do these things. Don’t get me wrong, my professor and other students were there to assist me and offer suggestions but I had to figure out the bigger parts on my own (Slack was a huge help when I needed some quick responses from people).
We’ll start with the easier parts. The About.me page was pretty simple. Although I had never set one up it was pretty straightforward and not too complicated. The hardest part was attempting to portray myself as a professional filmmaker while I was still student and ignoring my previous jobs and experiences unrelated to film. I have made a few projects but I had never considered myself, or tried to portray myself as, a professional filmmaker. It took a lot of thinking and a lot of editing, but I think I did a decent job in the end.
The Linkedin page was a lot easier than my About.me page. In my bio I talked about myself as a professional filmmaker, but because it is more of an online resume I was able to put in my previous work experience. In addition to being a professional filmmaker, I was able to put my past 6 years of work experience that include a few management positions so I feel very confident about submitting my resume to companies for hire.
The blog is where it really started to get challenging. I have never once in my life blogged, or set up a blog, but it was a good precursor to helping me learn how to set up my website. This is where assistance from my colleagues was very helpful. Others that I knew have experience with blogging, so I discussed with them what websites were there favorite to blog on and why. Some suggested Weebly and Wordpress because there were a lot of different facets and you could tailor it to make it look pretty and be exclusive to you. I liked that, but I had no experience doing that so I went with a simpler approach: Medium. Medium is specifically for blogging and writing. While you can’t change a whole lot about the blog page in Medium, it was perfect for what I needed. It has my title at the top, and then lists my blog posts throughout the page. Why overcomplicate things if I don’t need to?
The website was the most difficult thing I encountered in my experiential learning experience. I had never set up a blog and definitely had never set up a webpage. I would have loved to create my own webpage exactly how I wanted it, but I had no idea where to even start with that. The first part was picking my domain name, which I purchased through Namecheap. I had a few in mind: advid.com, ardvid.com, ardproductions.com, and ardvideo.com. Most had been taken or were very expensive, but ardvideo.com was available and I like the way it looks. It wasn’t too long, and describes what my website is so I went with it. In my stressed out haze caused by my job and schoolwork overload, I thought making my website on Medium would be a good idea. Oh, how wrong I was. Getting my website to resolve to my Medium page was way more complicated than it should have been. So after a few days of talks with customer support from Medium and Namehceap it finally resolved. Shortly after that I realized that my website on Medium was not how I wanted my website to be. It was very generic looking and really just looked like another blog, not like a portfolio. So instead of keeping it, I cut my losses and built a page on Weebly. Weebly only took a few minutes for me to figure out what all the different drag and drop options were and I could add different pages and make it look like a real website. I set everything up exactly how I wanted. I put buttons with links to my social media accounts, my aboutme page, linkedin page and even have a contact form on one of my pages should someone (hopefully) want to get in touch with me. Besides Weebly being simple to use and the flexibility of the setup, getting my domain name to resolve to the page was much more simpler. With Medium I had to add about 10 IP addresses to my domain list, with Weebly it was only two I had to add and my domain name was resolving to my Weebly site within about half an hour. I am extremely proud of the way my website turned out.
Making social media pages was another challenging step. I used Myspace and Facebook growing up, but never really got into Twitter. However, Twitter has blown up recently and is the best way to get information out to people in a timely and efficient manner. You can read about my social media strategy here. While I was looking into social media promotion I noticed that most companies, like the video production company I was starting, mainly used Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows you to post your content in statuses so everyone who has liked your page will see your new content. Twitter allows you to “tweet” your new content. I was very stressed out about promoting through social media, but in the end it was a relatively simple task once I decided what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.
Creating new content is always challenging. I have 7 films/videos on my website. An fiction film, two documentaries, and four other videos that are packages for news broadcasts. The news packages were harder than I thought they would be. I’ve always been interested in journalism, but I didn’t know that putting these packages together would be so challenging. Luckily, I was able to collaborate with a few people and we came up with what to report on and how to show it. I love editing so I handled that for those projects and even learned more about editing software while putting things in like logos and having to fix sound when it wasn’t the best quality. Currently, I am working on a wedding video that I really hoped I would have finished by now but it is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s something that the couple is going to keep forever and I want to make sure it is as perfect as possible. I am messing with the lighting, speed of the film, and all kinds of visual effects to make it look almost like a painting. It is an extremely tedious task. You can read more about my wedding video here and here. I have learned a whole lot between the wedding video and the news packages. With the news packages sound was the biggest issue. If you don’t have it set up just right it’s going to throw the entire thing off. Framing is also extremely important. You don’t want the person you are interviewing dead center, but you also don’t want them too far left or right. The wedding video has taught me even more. Number one: I hate Final Cut with a passion and it should be burned to the ground if there’s a way to burn software. Number two: due to low camera quality and the setting of the wedding, the footage came out looking very gray and dull. Through experimenting with different effects, I learned how to turn some dull looking footage into something lively and very attractive. I love editing am very proud of the way the video is turning out, but I have a ways to go.
Recent experiential learning made me realize that there are certain things I need to be able to do if I am going to continue my career as a professional filmmaker. I am going to need to know all of the ins and outs of editing software and video cameras, know how to build and improve webpages, and probably most importantly I am going to need to know how to solve problems quickly and learn how to work around unforeseen obstacles.
With my wedding video I am currently working on I had to film it using a borrowed camera. Sadly, I was not able to use one of the nice ones that has been lent to me in the past so I had to use one someone bought for personal purposes. It was less than nice. The picture quality and sound quality were not that great, I had no external microphones to use, and the worst part was that I did not have access to a tripod. I had to think on my feet and come up with a solution quickly for the filming aspect. A common phrase you will hear around the filming community when working on projects is “we’ll fix it in post”. That was pretty much what I was saying the entire time filming with the low quality footage. I had to try to hold the camera as steady as possible, but used not having a tripod to my advantage. There is something about a camera being handheld that can add a more realistic aspect to your film if you do it right. I’m not talking about Cloverfield, POV, running “shaky-cam”, just slight movements throughout the film that give the impression that you’re looking at it through the eyes of a person, rather than through a camera. The second was the sound and video quality. As I stated before, the video on the camera looked dull and gray so I had to use some video effects to spice it up. The sound was so bad I don’t think there will be any sound in the final product at all, but that’s not a big issue. That experience taught me a lot about how to make an essentially terribly low quality video into something that looks like it was filmed with extremely nice equipment.
When I filmed the reunion episode for the reality show Love in the Macon the problems my colleague and I encountered were framing and spacing obstacles. We had all the nice equipment we needed: two fancy camera, tripods, a boom mic, four external wireless mics, and even a lighting kit (at this time I also learned that when filming with two cameras you need to make sure both are set with the exact same setting or else your footage will not come out great). You can read more about my reunion filming experience here. The venue the reunion was held at was a great venue, but the setup was difficult. We had a total of 11 people on camera. 10 cast members and the host. If we would have had a third camera it might have been simpler but one camera had to be the establishing shot that showed all 11 people in the same frame. This was extremely difficult to get because of a staircase and 2 pillars blocking our way. So after moving the set around 3 or 4 times we finally had it set up with everyone in the frame, the mics and lights just out of the frame so we could have everyone lit up and hear what they were saying. While it did take us 3 or 4 tries to get the set right, we had to do some very quick problem solving as we were all on a time schedule and this is not something that could easily be redone. The ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently is the most important thing I have learned from the experiential learning experience.
These experiential learning experiences have taught me a lot and made me realize a lot. My passion for film has really come through. I knew I was very interested in it, but every time I set up a camera, got the lights just right, and hooked up all the sound equipment, I realized I was in love with production. Editing has always been my favorite part but there’s something about setting everything up as perfect as possible in order to capture an event that is really a lot of fun for me. Despite the challenges I face doing it, I truly enjoy every minute of it. It is very gratifying. In short, I have decided that I most certainly want to pursue film as a career. Whether I get a job with a production company and I’m just a boom mic operator, a cameraman, or an editor, or can successfully run my own film company, it is what I really want to do and will do everything I can to make sure that happens. In the meantime I will be collaborating with a few colleagues to make a short film in the next few weeks and will hopefully work on more projects throughout the summer. I would really like to make another short film or a documentary. I really like documentaries. Other than creating new content with the collaboration of others I am considering going to grad school to study film and further my expertise through the program.
