The first step in our process was deciding on what topic to cover. First we created a document where we collaborated and wrote some topics that we felt would be interesting to cover. We narrowed the selection down by picking 3 topics that we felt were the best choices for this assignment. After diving deeper into each topic we decided that making our video about propaganda and how to spot it was the best choice. Due to this being a group project I felt that this may have been a hard step since we may have different topics in mind. However everything went smoothly and we quickly decided on a topic without any troubles.
Once we decided on a topic we made an outline of what our video would consist of. Before we started actually writing the script we did a literature review to refresh our knowledge of propaganda. In addition to reading through chapter 5 again we tried to find more information online. We found an additional interesting video by crashcourse going in depth on propaganda called “The Dark(er) Side of Media”. The New York Times also had many interesting articles about propaganda, one of which was “The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election”. Having a partner greatly helped in this section. Since we both have our own techniques for finding information we both have found different sources that we may have never found on our own.
For the video we wanted to split the video into two parts so that we could even out the work. We decided that I would open up the video by introducing propaganda and advertising and Megan would talk about the techniques to spot propaganda and the harm of spreading it. While writing our outline we added images to our document next to the sections so that we could have a rough outline of what we wanted our video to show.
Once we finished writing the outline we decided to write a script. Our script followed our rough outline but went more in depth on each of the topics. Once the script was done we split it up into sections so that we could evenly divide the voice lines.
Next in our process we chose a video animation tool. Out of the three tools that were recommended we chose PowToon since it was simple and had a lot of pre made content to choose from. PowToon offered many different templates and we decided together that the Modern Edge template looked the best. Having a partner for this process was a great way to keep the video creative. I am not a very creative person when it comes to creating animations so having Megan help out with some ways to visualize some ideas was a great way to show the “power of two”. We ran into a problem with the collaboration feature in powtoon where we weren't able to edit each other's animations. So we had to create our own animations and then combine them at the end. Once we finished our animations we recorded our voice lines and added them to our animations.
Looking back at the process of this project, having a partner throughout it was a great help. Whenever one of us would be stuck at a point having a partner to ask questions and get suggestions from saved a lot of time and really boosted the creativity of our project.