We had a lot of fun making this video. I think my talent was a bit perplexed by the order that we shot it - I shot certain shots at the same time even though they were totally out of sync until editing. This educational video was harder to make than it looks.
The first shots were the shots in the classroom. The scene "did I hear somebody say they need help with non-permissible values of the denominator?" took about 10 takes to do because we were laughing so hard.
Everything in the classroom went pretty smoothly. I had to redo the video for the shots where I am shooting the solutions to the students' "homework", the questions they did off of the board. When I went to edit that night I recognized that I was just a little out of focus, so the following day I redid them myself and used the audio from the original track. You can obviously tell they were recorded with a recorder since they lack the ambient noise from the room. I used audio transitions to make the transitions as smooth as possible.
The shots in the "bank" were by far the trickiest. I acted as cameraman/light person... One thing I did not plan for was all the background noise coming from the fridges (we filmed in the servery simply because it had a wicket for that "bank feel"). I tried everything - I tried using a sock on the mic, we did countless takes, and in some of them one of the freezers would kick in with an even louder buzz when one of my talent was in mid-sentence. In the end, I spent literally hours using filters, adjusting audio levels, extracting the audio and putting the audio through Audacity and tried to clean it up there... Here is the result - I tried my best!
Also note the scenes when the banker is counting the money. I had to redo the audio for those using the mic recorder I borrowed from Jay. The buzzing from the originals was too loud. "The banker" and I found a small room (office) in the school where echoes would not be such an issue. I had her watch the original clips on my laptop, then she would count in time to her original hand-movements. Matching the audio to video was a bit of a task but I think I pulled it off.
The "security camera" scenes required a lot of manipulating of the original video. I researched how to get a security camera effect on Final Cut Express and was told that a filter called "Bad TV" would do the trick. Unfortunately my version of Final Cut Express did not have this so I had to fool around by hand. I learned a lot in this process about FCX!
The "heart-beat" sound effect was tricky. It sounded good when I was done editing but when I exported it it was much too loud... It took some manipulating to get it to the volume I wanted.
To maintain some continuity, I used the same introductory music and credit music as the video I used for my educational video from ETAD 803 last year. Who knows - this could become it's own channel one day! :)
The point of this video is to explain why you cannot divide by zero. I tried to take a somewhat difficult concept and make it "real world" and "hands on" using some comedy and drama. I also tried to make the content be used in various levels of mathematics. See below:
Curriculum connections/grade-level appropriateness
- A middle years mathematics student should be able to understand the concepts until 4:42 in the video.
- Foundations & Pre-Calculus 10: Slopes of vertical lines (m = rise/run .... this situation arises when the run is 0) (until 4:42)
- Workplace and Apprenticeship Mathematics 20 and 30: Slopes of Lines (until 4:42)
- Pre-Calculus 20: Non-permissible values of the denominator, Rational Expressions, Graphing Reciprocal Functions (entire video, focus on 4:43 onwards)
- Pre-Calculus 30: Undefined and indeterminate values, Graphing Rational Expressions (entire video, focusing on 4:43 onwards)
- Calculus 30: Slopes of tangent and secant lines, curve sketching, evaluating limits
Enjoy. I hope you learn something! I sure did - I now feel more than confident with new editing software (Final Cut Express), shot selection, and especially audio editing!
