My all time favorite project during this semester was creating a video story. I put a lot of time and effort into this project and it was fun to edit it down to the required elements. Working with the vast tools on Premiere was new to me. The possibilities were endless. The special effects I was able to learn some shortcuts along the way. 

Some of the skills I believe I will use in the future are photoshop, premiere, and illustrator.

I’m not entirely sure how this will fit into my career path, only that it likely will. The skills I learned this semester are going on my resume. I will be using my skills to volunteer and assist my local bicycle club with a banner for the upcoming Sunday Portland Parkways 2020.

 There were so many skills offered in this semester course. I have barely scratched the surface of the capabilities adobe offers. It was a great deal of content and I learned skills I didn’t even know existed. It was challenging and rewarding. 

The resources COM 210 provided were sufficient to my learning experience. I did use Youtube as well, to assist with some more intricate special effects. However, the video provided in the course content was sufficient too. Most everything was trial and error. I don’t think by any means I am a master at this product. I would venture to say I am somewhat proficient. I will continue to work with this program going forward as I need it for my volunteering efforts. I’d really like to get a little quicker. WSU provided a very comprehensive course. While there were many moments I didn’t think I was going to get through this, I’m happy to say I survived it and ended up really enjoying the process and having fun while learning. It doesn’t get much better. Thank you, WSU. 

For my final Video Story, I chose to make changes based on the feedback from peers. The location is the same as my draft shoot my story from Vancouver, WA at the new waterfront area that was recently developed and opened to the public. 

My blog topic this semester is related to bicycling, road, mountain, cx, road racing, loaded touring, gear, components, best safety practices, etc… 
This project relates to my course topic design as it relates to “anything bikey!”

The topic of my final Video Story is, ‘Night Time Bicycling Best Practices.’ 

Dusty Johnson accompanied me on the project and it was an honor to work with him again. Dusty shares the same passion for cycling that I do. He rolls a mountain bicycle, while I typically roll a road-bike. Whatever you bicycle ride, safety is IMPORTANT. 

From the original 2 minute draft of my story, I was able to clean up and swap out music tracks and shortened the pano. The total time of the final video is now My title fades out in the beginning with a still pano using freesound.org nebulatechnohouseloop. The feedback I received was that my music was not fitting on my video draft story. This music track was more upbeat and happier and I think that was great advice. I added 5 seconds of no video with the music track only. Other feedback my peers gave me was to be able to show Dusty as I introduced him.

More cutting and clipping to get rid of the choppy parts and dead spots to align the audio with the visual of Dusty. I used the same tools as before. I right clicked on the specific clip and it brought up a menu that allowed me to  uncheck the enable box and drag off the video feed to a different bar. This ‘grays’ out the portions not wanted. Also, it allows me to not completely lose the footage if I changed my mind and want something back. One peer said they didn’t like the plane sound flying over head. After reviewing the clip a few times, I decided to leave the plane flying over head as it was more real time.

I work a lot with “video effects.” For example, on my still image pano at the beginning of my story with ‘effects control’ panel it was fun to use the add/remove key-frame functions. Working the position horizontal, left clicking and dragging very slowly to find the end of the frame and then for my final end point, dragging slow to the left. In addition, I was able to control the velocity to slow the frame down or increase the speed of the still shot. I picked a 4pt fill gradient for the title and used 4 different colors, as well as shadows and outer stroke.

Thank you or viewing and giving me the feedback I needed to make changes to produce my final story.

Kathleen Hellem

Night Time Bicycling Best Practices

For my draft Video Story, I chose to shoot my story from Vancouver, WA at the new waterfront area that was recently developed and opened to the public. 

My blog topic this semester is related to bicycling, road, mountain, cx, road racing, loaded touring, gear, components, best safety practices, etc… 

This project relates to my course topic design as it relates to “anything bikey!”

The topic of my draft Video Story is, ‘Night Time Bicycling Best Practices.’ 

Dusty Johnson accompanied me on the project and it was an honor to work with him again. Dusty shares the same passion for cycling that I do. He rolls a mountain bicycle, while I typically roll a road-bike. Whatever you bicycle ride, safety is IMPORTANT. 

From the beginning of my two video clips taken earlier in the week, I gathered about 8 minutes of live video. Crazy. Then I used Premiere to edit the final product to meet the 2 minutes. My title fades out in the beginning with a still pano and “The Dramatic Music. Wav” from https://freesound.org/people/xtrgamr/sounds/331624/ 

It was hours of work and would run me well over 300 words required for this project. But I will share in the best way I know how to explain. I learned how to work with the video effects control opacity and position, scale, volume leveling for the audio. In part of the editing to discard what wasn’t desired, I right clicked on the specific clip and it brought up a menu that allowed me to  uncheck the enable box and drag off the video feed to a different bar. This ‘grays’ out the portions not wanted. Also, it allows me to not completely lose the footage if I changed my mind and want something back. 

 I work a lot with “video effects.” For example, on my still image pano at the beginning of my story with ‘effects control’ panel it was fun to use the add/remove key-frame functions. Working the position horizontal, left clicking and dragging very slowly to find the end of the frame and then for my final end point, dragging slow to the left. In addition, I was able to control the velocity to slow the frame down or increase the speed of the still shot. I picked a 4pt fill gradient for the title and used 4 different colors, as well as shadows and outer stroke.

I hope you enjoy my video. I look forward to viewing all of my peers work over the next couple of days.

Kathleen Hellem

I decided for my Final Audio Story, to make some adjustments to the cuts. I created 10 seconds of silence in voice recorder and moved it to my second track in audition, and created more space in between the interview to create more smooth transition. 

My peers advised me to lay a soundtrack of music. I selected Gameloop.wave from the Freesound site. I liked the upbeat sound of it. I think it was good background music. I downloaded it and dragged to my files window in audition.Then I dragged it to the fourth track, then duplicated the music track to make sure it was long enough to cover my interview with Dusty. I did some editing to it the music track too. I played around with the volume and tried to make sure my music track didn’t overshadow my interview with Dusty. While it’s not perfect, it was an authentic interview and a challenging and rewarding process. Because I had more time to meet my 2 minutes, as my actual interview piece was about 1:15, I added more music track to give a nice introduction and nice transition to the conclusion. 

I learned how to make the wave-form larger in order to make editing more precise. Adjusting the decibel levels on the two tracks was a learning process. I really over all like the way this turned out! Over all, this is a time consuming process. I found myself changing my mind a lot. For example, what music track should I use? It’s really interesting to me how many different tracks people have contributed to Freesound.com. There is a lot of different options and it took time to decide what will mix well with my story. It’s been fun using AU, Freesound, and soundcloud. I’ve learned a lot. Thank you for listening.

By Kathleen Hellem Interview with Dusty Johnson

I decided to create my audio project using Adobe Audition, and my topic was bike themed content. There are so many different styles of riding a bicycle. Mountain, road, cycle cross, touring, and commuting to name a few. 

The design process of my interview includes short, complete and conversational questions. Dusty, the gentleman in my neighborhood that I interviewed, was able to express what he likes and dislikes about cycling in general, while doing so his personality really showed through. I’m inspired by his ability to use his bicycle for so many different uses in general. I see Dusty around town often. He is always tooling around with his bike and takes great pride in keeping it in the best operating condition possible. Dusty helps people when they need a mechanic too. This inspired me to interview him. In general, anything bike related, he knows a little something about. There are no right or wrong answers. I was interested to talk about cycling from Dusty’s perspective. I appreciated his time and getting to know him a little better. Like all cyclists, we both have similar gripes about weather and automobiles and their constant threats to us, but more importantly we share a passion for bicycles in general, and love of the sport. 

How I collected the data for my audio project was using voice recorder on my computer. In addition, Dusty provided a picture of his bike trailer loaded down headed to the recycle place. While, this isn’t his main usage of the bike, I found this to be one of the best images of hauling cans that I’ve ever seen. 

The tools I used was mainly the razor tool to make many, many cuts. The slip tool which allows the ability to move small chunks of the recording and   … Lot’s of cutting and moving. Some of the challenges I experiences was condensing material and capturing what’s relevant. The raw data gathered was lengthy lending to a lot of editing. My tips to anyone is to ZOOM in with your magnifying glass in order to get precise individual words edited. Otherwise, it takes too long.

I’m looking forward to creating my final draft.  I hope this helps my classmates and I look forward to seeing your drafts.

My final logo took many hours! I’m pleased with the results over all. I like riding bicycles in my spare time and PBC is Portland Bicycling Club founded in 1971. We recently changed our name from Portland Wheelmen Touring Club this year to be more inclusive. I volunteer at Portland Sunday Parkways annually and many people didn’t like the “wheelmen” portion of our club name. Something about excluding women and non-binary. Problem solved.

My peers at WSU made suggestions which I implemented for the most part. For example, I put yellow lines in the road to depict and actual road and centered my text. I wasn’t able to produce an actual bicycle at this point, as one of my peers recommended. The COG alone took me three hours alone. Some of the processes was using the layers windows to hide portions of my project while I was working on my project. I have 5 layer, and multiple effects on each layer. I learned to the scale tool, used compound path, locked selected sections down in order to prevent unintended selections of things I didn’t want to change. I like using layers because it enables me to manipulate individual sections. I used star, ellipse, rectangular tools. I did a bunch of arranging, moving items to the back and front. I used the stroke tool to added weight. I used the scissors tool to cut away portions of the shapes I didn’t want. I went with MV Boli font and used warp and arch functions. I used the appearance tab to manage my layers.

This has been a journey! Thank you, everyone for the feedback and direction.

Kathleen Hellem