Digital Project

My digital project is focused on how the entertainment industry stereotypically portrays different dialects. The inspiration for my project came from my Language and Linguistic class and an article by Leah Zuidema entitled “Myth education: Rationale and Strategies for Teaching Against Linguistic Prejudice”. The purpose of my film is teaching against linguistic prejudice by debunking common language myths and revealing how the entertainment industry and pop culture contributes to our stereotypical portrayals of people based on the dialects they speak. My goal is for students to be able to critically analyze the examples in the video to reveal how the dialects are portrayed and understand why they are not accurate portrayals of a dialect as a whole. Ultimately, students should be able to conclude that the skewed images cause unfair judgments and that, in fact, a person’s dialect does not reflect their intelligence. This video gives students real-life examples that they can relate to, and hopefully they will use what they learned from the video in the outside world and think twice about negatively judging someone if they do not speak “Standard English”.

I chose to use Movie Maker mainly because I wanted to include movie clips as examples in my video. I have used Movie Maker before, but I never had the opportunity to work with the program so extensively, especially editing and combining video clips from various sources. Before, I downloaded all of the video directly from my video recorder, but this time I experienced with using clips from YouTube. I found that Movie Maker is very sensitive to the type of videos uploaded into its program as well as which parts of the video can be edited. For example, it only read .avi video files and not .divx video files, and a codec on the .avi file prevented me from editing the clip at the beginning. I tried to download other video editing software, such as Divx Author, but discovered Movie Maker is more user friendly when it comes to transitions and making titles. I, therefore, settled with Movie Maker for lack of finding a better free program. In my search, I did find a free file converter which finally allowed me to convert my files into a type more compatible with Movie Maker. After converting the files, I was able to edit the video clips the way I wanted to. After uploading and editing all the clips, I began adding the titles, transitions, and audio. The titles were self-explanatory, but the transitions and audio provided me with another challenge. I recorded all of my audio using Audacity, which I found to be really easy to use and upload into Movie Maker. I encountered the problem when I began adding transitions because they moved the audio files. It was stressful trying to match up the video, audio, and transitions because each second counts. I also realized that the less “fancy” transitions, the better because they can become distracting.

Creating this digital project really became a trial and error experience. Over all, from this project I learn that patience is a virtue and that Google becomes your best friend for searching for other free video editing software, suggestions, and help. Although I do not feel like a Movie Maker expert from creating this video, I do feel more comfortable with the program, and I definitely think the knowledge I gained about the program, including the up and downs, will allow me to more effectively implement a similar assignment in my future classroom.