Gravity

This was the assignment for INTE 5680: Create a 30-second video that illustrates a concept using no spoken words. I'm a physics teacher, and always looking for ways to make invisible concepts more visible. So I chose the concept of gravity. Can you tell this is the first smartphone video I've ever constructed? My comments accompanying the video are below.

I guess I'll give away the topic of my video by using its title: Gravity. Would anyone have been able to guess it without knowing beforehand?

I used my Samsung Galaxy smartphone to record the video clips. Music and sound effects are by me, edited with Audacity (which just gets more amazing with time). The video was edited and assembled with Filmora (well worth purchasing). The file was uploaded to my channel on YouTube.

A Day in the Life in the Future

The assignment: produce an Alternative Media Item using a new media tool. I chose ThingLink as my tool for this project. It's a tool for marking up images and video. I think I chose it because I had been thinking of using Zaption for my final project, and have since learned that Zaption will no longer be available. I never got a chance to use Zaption, and so I thought ThingLink might be similar.

I actually didn't like it that much. I kept being thwarted by options that really weren't available - and then I'd get the prompt to pay for the pro version. The whole salesmanship approach was really annoying - it wasn't even that amazing a tool. It occurred to me that Captivate could have done the same thing.

Anyway I imagined a day in the life of a high-school student in 2046. What I created was a week's agenda for students in my physics class. The twist was that my school was embedded in a spaceport on Mars, and that my students were located in four places in the solar system. I was imagining that I would have an LMS at my disposal for the course, and this agenda was a single page in that LMS. I had fun with the graphics, which I did in Photoshop, and I thought of cool resources (that currently exist) that might still exist in 2046. I also made a little podcast with Audacity. Files were stored in SoundCloud, Google Docs, and ThingLink.

Let's Make a Rocket!

After all the reading for this unit, I wanted to create something that really took advantage of a smartphone's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses. Since I'm pretty handy with websites, I created a web app (essentially a single-page website).

First I used Photoshop to create a collection of graphics. I've always admired the high-contrast, simple, cartoon-like graphics you see in mobile apps, but I've never made them. It involves using vector paths for drawing, something that Photoshop can do but which is what Illustrator is really designed for. I don't have Illustrator, so I went with Photoshop, but I've never really tried to do anything with vector paths before. Whew! One learning curve to climb!

Second, I wanted to design a tall, thin web page, something that would involve no horizontal scrolling to view. I wanted to tell a story that had minimal text, mostly graphics. I wanted the end product to be in html. HEY EVERYBODY, get this free download - a program called Macaw that uses an Adobe-like interface to design visually with graphics and text (kinda like Captivate) but which outputs automatically to html and css. You don't need to know any code (though knowing a little will allow you to get the full benefit). It's fantastic, and it allows you to build a responsive web app that will scale correctly on any device (using something called breakpoints, which was also new to me). Another learning curve, but well worth it.

Third, I've always been intrigued with scrolling animation. This involves graphics that are animated, and the animation is triggered by the vertical scrolling. Here's the most involved example of this I've seen - NASA: Prospect, a graphic story with music, and all the animation is driven by the vertical scrolling. It's very cool, but unfortunately it's only partially responsive. Look at it on a big screen, it'll be frustrating with a smartphone!

Scrolling animation has always struck me as perfect for mobile, and I've always wanted to try it. Alas, there's no software I've found out there yet using drag-and-drop for scrolling animation, so you'll need to know html, css, and a little JavaScript. I coded my animation using Animate.css. Just visit the site and play around! Then I used the Waypoints JavaScript library. Yet another learning curve.

Then I packaged the web app into a container that made it a mobile app. Apparently many mobile apps are packaged this way. This was very easy to do using the MIT App Inventor.

If I were going to take this project further, I would add buttons that, when clicked, would add additional explanatory text and various options. I would also record audio snippets, also triggered by the scrolling, of me explaining certain things. And background music (it's sounding more and more like a Captivate project). Someday.

The mobile app is hosted on Google Cloud and can be downloaded from there. I've tested it on my Galaxy Grand Prime smartphone and my old Nexus tablet. The web app is also on Google Cloud, and can be viewed with any browser. I've tested it on my Nexus tablet and my Surface tablet (portrait and landscape). You can even view it on a big screen. Enjoy!

Lily the Labrador

Here she is, Lily the Labrador. Is she really from Labrador? Is "labrador" really a word? Find out!



So many new tools . . . The video was shot with a hand-held Samsung smartphone, only the second time I've ever done that. And the additional audio was recorded with an SM57 mic routed through a brand-new Shure adapter gizmo that turns it into a plug-and-play USB device. It's amazing! Further editing of that audio was done in Audacity. The music was played by yours truly.

I spent a bunch of time trying to get VirtualDub up and running on my new 64-bit computer. VirtualDub is a great video editor, but it can be tricky to work with. It does not shield you from the technical craziness of video filters and codecs! But I ended up not needing to use it. Instead all the editing was done with Filmora. And yes, I liked it enough to pay the $50. I'm used to using Windows Movie Maker 1.2 (the old version) which I really liked and which Filmora resembles. On my new computer I installed Movie Maker 2012, and came to really hate it. I gave up and went with Filmora. The video came out shorter than I thought it would be. I uploaded the video file to my YouTube channel.

I hope you enjoy it!