Emergent Literacy: I am a reader and writer

Production

Main shooting of the video took place on March 21st in the playroom and office of Ms. Smith's house. The video took about eight hours to shoot. Each of the ten video segments shot that day had at least one set. They each had between one and four actors; many acted in more than one video. In all, there were ten actors involved.

The younger children were taped in the afternoon, because they are so active in the morning. The children taped included two of Trish Smith neighbors, plus her own two children, two of Cathy Clay's children and Beth Ardoin's neighbor. Trish Smith participated in some of the videos and was present to offer ideas throughout the day. Because there were seven children in all, we hired a Beth's daughter, Jene't, for the day as child wrangler to attend to the children who were not being taped. Beth and Cathy played the roles of directors, sound engineers, light engineers, scenic artists and actors.

The last two videos, the ones of Madeleine Clay writing and reading, were taped at Cathy Clay's house later in the week. Cathy's husband assisted with taping.

Both team members participated in digitizing and capturing the video onto the computer. We had one hundred and twenty minutes of video, so we tried to do rough cuts as we digitized; first watching the video, then capturing timed edits of "good" clips. This system was beneficial in saving server space. Since we later completely filled the D:/ drive with good clips for only 10 of the videos, we were pleased that we had used this method.

Beth created a spreadsheet in Dreamweaver and both team members helped to fill it out. The spreadsheet served as a visual and organizational aid in knowing just what had been done and what needed to be done. This was very useful with so many videos in various states of completion at any given time. Both team members participated in capturing and editing the videos. Below is a screen capture from Adobe Premiere of one of our videos. 

Learning from each other and the instructors, we found short cuts and various ways to perform some of the tasks. Lastly music, transitions, and titles were added. These really made the videos seem more "complete."

Both team members wrote material for the report and assisted in organizing, proofing and building final report into a polished website.

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Last updated: May 08, 2001.