What I Eat In a Day, Vegetarian Version

The Assignment: What I Eat In a Day (Five Stars)

The Story: I love to eat (who doesn’t?) so I actually had a lot of fun doing this assignment. This clip tells the story of an Italian-American vegetarian and her daily consumption. I also feel a little special because when I was looking for assignments to do for this week this one got my attention, and I saw that zero other people had completed it, so it gave me that extra motivation to be the first to get it done. Huzzah! I also had fun combining elements of previous weeks’ lessons with this assignment if that makes sense. To further elaborate, I found myself using a lot of what I learned this week and in week 1 while I was filming. I incorporated what I learned last week in audio storytelling when I was doing my voiceover and choosing my background music. And I did find myself thinking about design (week two) when I was doing my closing credits… overall a really fun assignment to do towards the end of the semester.

The How-To: The guidelines on this assignment are pretty loose, so I just started by recording everything I ate in one day. Ideally, I would have filmed myself eating everything to get more of an ASMR effect, but I actually had a really bad allergic reaction earlier this week and my face is still… recovering. (You can laugh; I look like a dog that swallowed a bee).

So needless to say, this was not a good week for me to record myself! Anyways, I recorded everything I ate in a day. I then headed over to iMovie since I have a Mac and I love going with the path of least resistance. iMovie was super user friendly and I had fun making my clip. To get started I went over to the file tab and selected import media. I then imported the video I took of Vic and I walking to the coffee shop and dragged it to the media stream at the bottom of the screen. I repeated this step several times until I had uploaded all of the clips I took during the day. I did upload my clips in chronological order just to make my life easier, but you don’t have to because iMovie will let you arrange the order of your clips by simply clicking and dragging them along the row at the bottom of the screen. Once I had all of my clips uploaded in order, I went over to the Titles tab and added my opening and closing credits. I did this by selecting a credit animation I liked and dragging it down to where I wanted it in my movie. (In this case, I put the opening credits before the first clip and the closing credits after the last clip).

I customized the credits by clicking on them at the bottom of the screen and then entering in my own text. Once I was satisfied with my credits, I decided I needed to add in some background music as well as some narration. For my background music, I chose Che La Luna because I felt like it was very fitting and it is a favorite of mine. I downloaded a free version onto my computer, converted it to a Wav file, then using the audio tab I uploaded it to my movie. I had to click and drag the audio to the music line below the video line at the bottom of the screen, but it was pretty simple and this tutorial explains it. Once I had my music added, I selected it, then hit “trim audio” to make the song last the duration of my movie, and not any longer. Finally, while still on the audio tab, I clicked the microphone icon to record my own voice over. I like how iMovie plays your video in real time as you’re recording the voiceover so you know how to time your speech. Once I was finished with my voiceover I uploaded my clip to YouTube using the share button on iMovie.