This weekend I learned to create short movies.  I was stuck indoors as it was pretty cold and miserable.  I’m not one to go out often unless there’s a specific reason to but the cold weather gave me an excuse to catch up with my reading as well as learning how to use iMovie on my new iMac.  Many of you remember the hassles I had trying to learn the iMac having recently migrated from Windows but as this is now under control and I *think* I am more confident navigating around the Mac screen, I thought I’d use the opportunity to do two things:

(a) Learn how to use the new app called Beme (especially if it has applications for a workplace social learning context) and,

(b) Learn how to use iMovie

As I had recently just received a Beme code to access this app, on first use of the program made my head spin.  It was asking me to find new followers and I didn’t know anyone nor did I actually want to follow people I didn’t know. This testing will have to wait until I have something worth filming aligned with a workplace context for work narration and if I can test it out with a small group of people whom I can trust rather than randoms.  So Beme has to wait for the time being.

Last week I attended the iMovie personal training at the Apple Store just to get the basics of importing video footage and inserting audio and other functions into the movie.  I particularly wanted to know the difference between Events and Projects and also how to remove the footage from the Mac so that it didn’t use up my hard drive space.  I had a couple of projects in mind to practice having recently taken footage from the National Wool and Sheep Show in Bendigo last week as well as some video clips from my latest knitting group.  I wanted to put together a couple of short videos around the theme of what we can learn about social learning from knitters.

My first movie was filmed in Bendigo at the Sheep Show and it’s about 8.5 minutes.  I captured different people talking about the show in particularly around the different industries that gather for this major national event that has been going on since 1877.  As the largest national sheep show in Australia, it’s an opportunity for everyone across this industry, from sheep farmers, wool growers, spinners, crafters, butchers, cooks and everyone in between to gather and celebrate the Australian sheep industry.  I used the Show to explain how organisations can learn from this example as a gathering of customers, suppliers, vendors, employees and the local community – a massive network of people and industries who gather to learn from each other.  I still need to make some final edits before the movie will be sent to the LearningNow TV which hopefully, they’ll accept as a submission to be aired later this year.

The second short movie was around the idea that learning is more effective when it happens socially.  One dreary cold wet Sunday afternoon, I took video footage of myself knitting around the various rooms of our house.  In all honesty, I didn’t know what to do with this footage but only once I put it all into the iMovie viewer, I scrambled together some pieces and put a logical flow to create a story line.

What was happening in the background was that I was knitting a QR Code and I wasn’t having much success with it.

@IndaloGenesis @GerardineTweets @hjarche @ThisMuchWeKnow @JoachimStroh @simongterry @johnstepper pic.twitter.com/8X4qyZznCp

— Helen Blunden (@ActivateLearn) June 28, 2015

Undoing the pins and trying to dry it flat and square instead. Let’s see how this goes. pic.twitter.com/toftXYFCVx

— Helen Blunden (@ActivateLearn) June 22, 2015

I had knitted it twice (really, three times as I had ripped out one version) and took it to my knitting group for some ideas.  This Sunday, our knitting group had met at a local Melbourne cafe and when I showed them the code, they were intrigued.  For one, they had no idea what it was and secondly, when I explained what a QR code was and that I wanted it to scan to my website, they wanted to create their own.  They gave me some excellent advice around the types of yarn I should be using but also explained that the nature of knitting is that I’ll never be able to get a full square (a pixel).  So here’s the video I created with that background story.

So all in all a productive weekend of learning and experimentation with iMovie.  If you’re interested, I found this fab music site called Incompetech for the music.

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