 The 2001-02 Grade 10 Communications Technology class has been making short videos, using both an 8mm video camcorder and a Sony Digital Mavica F83 (which records 'mpg' movies as well as stills). Students write and edit their own scripts for commercials, interviews, math lessons, and other projects, and then film them as scripted. Students do their own in-camera editing, and then the finished scenes are imported to the computer for clean-up editing and joining.
  
 See our page describing our filming of the Titanic love scene, and our versions of Snow White, and our final class production of Cinderfella, which includes some amazing special effects. And for some fun, visit our Academy Awards presentations page, to see who won. Scenes filmed on the Sony digital camera are already in mpg format on a floppy, so can be transferred immediately to a computer. A Dazzle Digital Video Creator (version 3.6) input device is used to import movies from a VCR (transferred from the camera in VHS format); these are turned into digital mpg videos. We use a program called MGI VideoWave to edit the digital video files, add music, sound effects, and fades, and to output the results, also in mpg format. The program will also export videos in other formats, and will even create a full-screen video on a VHS cassette, using the Dazzle interface (although this requires massive amounts of RAM and a huge hard drive). Completed computer videos range in size from just over 1MB to some which are 20MB. (Our production of Snow White runs seven and a half minutes, and is 45 MB.) Most are produced at 160 by 120 pixels; a few are larger. We produce the videos in this small format in order to limit the file size; students can keep their work in their school computer folders, and share it with others. Short videos can be taken home on floppies, or posted to our on-line library (see below), but a CD burner is used to transfer and store the larger ones. You can see some samples of student work, past and present, by downloading some of the smaller completed videos from our website's on-line Video Library; others will be released on our Video CD, which will be available next year. All of the videos created during this school year will also be included with the CD version of this Yearbook, when it is released.
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Working on scripts
Reviewing and editing