Printed from "Life in the Tech Lab" site

Living Memories Project

 

This project will help you reflect on a special person, event, or artifact that brings good memories to you and your family.

Rubric

Click here to view the grading rubric for this project.

Project Overview


Introduction

By taking time to reflect upon your life experiences and perhaps being willing to enhance or restructure your story from a new perspective, the story will enable you to heal or redefine the path you walk. Even the simple act of searching the multitude of possible personal stories to tell allows you to sort, prioritize and finally select one life experience that represents something especially important to you now.   Each digital story uses a personal experience to develop a living memory with a specific point, a moral, an a-ha awareness or a specific understanding.

Stories keep memories alive. Your life stories as well as your family's stories about the most memorable life experiences are worth preserving. It is now possible through digital media to make your personal stories come alive for generations to come. Not only the story itself is captured and preserved. But the art of weaving original photos with living artifacts of voice, scanned artifacts and music literally leaves a living legacy through time.

And just think of the joy and insights your life story will give to all those who know you and all those who are yet to know you in future time.

Click here to view Living Memory videos created by other students and teachers.

At Home

This project requires at least 25 – 30 pictures (photographs or hand drawn images) and possibly a few short video clips to keep the viewers interest.  These will need to come from your own families photo and video collection. 


By Monday, January 3, 2011, you must bring in 30 – 40 pictures on a flash drive of the person or family event your digital story will highlight.   If you only have print pictures, see the section titled “Creating Digital Pictures from Print.”


Think of just the right music for your video.  It can be a favorite song you and the person enjoyed, a song that you remember from the event, or a song with words that are just right to express your feelings.  You can include more than one song!   Bring either the CD or an mp3 file to class for each song you want to include in your video.

At School

On the first week back from vacation, we’ll begin our project!  Here are the steps we’ll follow.

  1.  Write the narrative for our project.  It helps to have the pictures clearly in mind as you write the narrative.  I’ll show you how to print small pictures to help you as you write.
  2. Save pictures on the C: drive and import into Premiere Elements. 
  3. Record your narration in Premiere Elements.
  4. Put pictures in order on the timeline.  Adjust times to match the narration.
  5. Add pan and zoom to create interest.
  6. Add transitions when they are effective.
  7. Add music and adjust it to play under narration.  Bring the music up to full volume where you want it to add to the story or create emotion.
  8. Add your title and credits.
  9. Create an .avi movie to share.

Creating Digital images from Print Pictures

The easiest way to accomplish this is to just take a picture of the picture!  Follow these simple directions.

  1. Find a dark cloth to lay your pictures on when you take them.  Black velvet works the best of all.
  2. Lay a picture on the dark cloth.
  3. Hold the digital camera DIRECTLY OVER the picture.  Don’t tilt the camera or you’ll get a skewed picture.  Look for shadows.  If you see shadows in the picture you take, you’ll need to move around until they are gone.  You could also place a desk lamp to help you eliminate shadows.
  4. Make sure the flash is OFF when you take your picture to avoid glare.
  5. You might have to turn on the Macro mode of your digital camera to get the best focus for your pictures.  Experiment to see what works best.

Description: C:\Users\phil_biggs\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\0Z4L1KN9\MC900334364[1].wmfNOTE:  Make sure your camera is set to take a high quality picture.  Set your camera to the highest resolution possible when you take your picture of a picture.  This will prevent your picture from becoming pixelated when you pan and zoom in your video. 

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