#honganho

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Final Reflection [Teresa Ho]

Wow! What a class. I am amazed to have learned so much. After watching my finished product multiple times, I am struck with how true it was that the process of getting here was not a sequence of explicit steps but rather a mishmash of several things happening at once. I was constantly reworking my script and altering it to best enhance my visuals (or vice versa).

My main goal was to impart the information in a way that was true to my personality but still managed to capture the attention of and inspire curiosity in the audience. I believed that I have achieved this goal. I structured my video in the following way: (1) inspire curiosity about black holes, in particular the question of why black holes are black, (2) explain the role gravity takes in black holes, (3) begin to deconstruct the myth that gravity only affects mass, (4) explain why gravity affects massless light, thus making black holes black, (5) leave the audience with a little something extra, to encourage further discovery on their own. With such a structure, I was able to answer all the questions my video proposed in a clear and logical yet natural manner, and with the choice of medium (animation), I was able to give my audience what a blog post would not - a visualization of the warping due to gravity.

However, my learning wasn’t restricted to the making of my video. While directing Teryn’s video, I realized the amount of thought that needed to be placed into the set-up of each shot. Because Teryn’s videos mostly consisted of shots of her speaking to the camera, it was important to keep in mind her stance and the background, so that there would be enough of a difference between each shot that a jump cut would not seem awkward. We experimented with camera movement to add interest to each scene (for example, moving the camera from her face to her computer screen and back again), as well as with different poses to add personality (for example, sitting with her legs propped up to emphasize the perceived laziness of the procrastinator).

As a whole, I am immensely satisfied with how much I have learned about writing for a K-12 audience, creating a video, and animating. I hope in the future, there will be more I can do in this field to build my identity, inspire curiosity, and create a sense of agency in my audience.

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Shared with Dropbox

Teresa’s Original Storyboard

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Day 8 [Teresa Ho]

Day 8 was immensely helpful. It made the whole of the project much more concrete - the work that needs to be done will be plenty, but I know now that it will be surmountable.

I believe I have settled onto a good script and an engaging storyboard. I am eager to start filming and animating. The technical aspects of the project will be challenging, but I think the most difficult part will be staying true to my vision.

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Day 7 [Teresa Ho]

Today’s exercise was incredibly encouraging. I had worked hard on making my script as palatable, engaging, and authentic as possible, and I think that it really paid off! Most everybody enjoyed the script and found it comprehensible. I was so happy. There are definitely a few minor tweaks that need to be made it get it to where it needs to be to be a great video, but I am so excited! I really think I can do it, and I am looking forward to how everything will turn out. I am amazed at how far my work has come in such a short time. I am very happy.

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Script Draft 3 [Teresa Ho]

Why are black holes black? Well, the answer has a lot to do with gravity. In young stars, there is a constant outward pressure that exists in equilibrium with the pull of gravity. When giant stars reach the final stage of their lives, they blow up, and there’s no outward pressure to counteract this pull of gravity. And the star begins to collapse in on itself and starts to become a black hole. It becomes so dense that at a certain boundary, called the event horizon, there’s no escaping this gravity. We usually think of gravity as only affecting objects that have mass, but in the case of black holes, the gravity is a force so strong that it affects [dramatic zoom in to face] space and time.

But let’s take a step back [comedic zoom out] before we get a little too complicated.

Let’s look at an analogy. [pan to empty open street]

Say we had someone [I pop into view, left third of the screen. “Oo, that’s me! Hi, me!”] and this someone decides to walk all the way around the earth. [I walk off to the right, all the way off-screen.]

[view of my feet, from above, walking from left to right.] From their two-dimensional perspective, they would say they are walking in a straight line.

[view of the earth] But look at it from a three-dimensional perspective, they’ve walked in a huge circle.

The same is true from the perspective of a photon or light particle in a black hole. From the three-dimensional perspective of a photon, the light is traveling in a straight line, but from the four-dimensional perspective of time and space, it’s traveling in a curved line.

Now imagine this happening to every photon traveling near the vicinity of a black hole. Within the event horizon, all photons in the area end up traveling in this warped time and space, along curved lines that end up inside the black hole.

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Day 6 [Teresa Ho]

Unfortunately, I had to miss class today, due to illness. I used some of this time to refine my script and storyboard.

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Day 5 [Teresa Ho]

Beginning filming today was immensely helpful - it gave me more of idea of the style in which I wanted present my information. I found that the most difficult portion of the filming was keeping track of the details. For example, it wasn’t enough to keep track of the shots needed and film them. It was also necessary to keep track of lighting, camera movement, consistency of shots, and timing of voiceovers. It became really easy to get caught up in the details and lose track of being authentic. I had to remind myself of the warmth and enthusiasm I wanted to convey in order to make sure my movements were natural and my tone upbeat.

Surprisingly, directing was also difficult. I had trouble articulating how things could be improved without making the host nervous or distracted. The details also mattered here - eye contact, host position, gesturing. I realized the director had a difficult job, indeed. He or she would have to understand the material and the host’s style as well as (if not better than) the host did.

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Day 4 [Teresa Ho]

Day 4 was somewhat stressful, but highly helpful. After Elizabeth walked us through the toolkit, we did an exercise in storyboarding. I had a portion of my script up as the basis for the exercise. After many questions from fellow classmates, however, I found that even after several revisions, my script needed a lot of work. The most obvious sign that it needed improvement was that I could not articulately answer what the point of the script was... It wasn’t clear if my video was intended to answer the question of “What do black holes do to light?” or “Why does gravity affect light?”. Being such a difficult topic to grasp for adults, much less for the K-12 audience, it was important that my purpose was clear.

While working on the storyboard itself, I also realized my content also needed work. At times, it felt like I had chosen the wrong words and put them in the wrong order, so that it made sense to me but few others. And I had a very poor idea of how to convey the content visually. It was extremely helpful to get others’ ideas on how the message could be articulated to visual learners. It was absolutely fascinating to see how different each proposed storyboard was, and it made it clear that people can teach, not just learn, in many different ways. (It reminded me of the Day 1 exercise, in which we watched videos of different methods of teaching evolution.)

During the presentation of the storyboard, I realized that my method of conveying the content required a level of thought that I had not previously realized. Every single minute detail had to be given attention, from the way things were animated to the type of transition between scenes. I left class feeling a bit overwhelmed but also encouraged. I had a lot to work on, but the exercise had given me so many ideas. I’d just have to sort through them and find the ones that would be authentic to me. I also realized what a great support system this class has - if I ever got stuck, I could rely on my peers to give me feedback and my instructors to give me quality advice. Using the method mentioned in the Pixar video, I drew several versions of my storyboard and reworked my script to suit each one. I think my next step will be to run through these a few more times until I find one that is both feasible and true to my style. I’m excited! I’m learning so much, and I’m really eager to see such progress in my product in such a short time.