This morning the video team ran a workshop for the BioEXCEL program on the Evanston campus. Partnered with One Book One Northwestern, the students are reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. All of the students are incoming freshman dedicating their summer to learn and get used to the Northwestern way of life! The students were tasked with taking a theme from the book and representing it through a short form video project. Stephen Poon and I (along with our awesome freelancers Erin Kitzinger, Alex Knell, and Gaby Kenyon) ran the demonstration this morning.
We started talking a little about the range of work we do at NUIT | A&RT | NUAMPS and transitioned into a talk about general production, lighting, composition, etc. Time was short so after a basic camera and tripod overview we sent them out to shoot. The BioEXCEL students have an extremely tight schedule and only had 3 hours to spare for the workshop (including shooting). After they returned we gave an editing demo using iMovie. It’s amazing how quickly the students picked up on the technology as many of them reported they had not used the software before. We went over basic video and audio editing, transitions, titles, and exporting projects. All the students will be editing their projects over the next week or so, and they will vote to see who has the best video. The top team will be receiving a mystery prize! Big thanks to Nancy Cunniff (One Book One Northwestern) and Luke Flores (BioEXCEL) for putting this project together!