For our Leap 2 Project, my partner and I decided to dive deeper into how media companies make money. Check out our finished project below!
As I reflect back on the process of creating my Leap 2 project, I feel pretty proud of how my partner and I did. After connecting with each other weeks ago, Toni and I immediately started discussing potential project topics. Once we decided what we wanted to inform our peers about, we brainstormed what information we were sure we wanted to include, how we wanted to say it, and who would be doing what parts of the project. We thankfully did not run into any major speed bumps along the road to starting the animations, but once we got there things were a little trickier. Since I have pretty decent experience in creating videos with animation and Toni had none, I offered to do this part myself. We figured that since we couldn’t get together in person, it would probably be much easier for one person to work on it, with feedback and help of course from the other. My challenges with creating these animations started right from the get-go. I went through many different animation programs before I arrived on the one we ended up using, Animaker. With each of the previous programs I tried, there were so many limitations that it would have been impossible to make the video we were envisioning. Thankfully, I came across Animaker, which looked to have everything that we needed for success.
As I began the editing process, I was pretty confident that I could finish up the video fairly quickly, but I was very wrong in this assumption. This program has so many great tools, but it is a little tricky to work with because of how precise things needed to be in order for a scene to look how you wanted it to. There was a lot of trial and error, but soon enough I was ready to put in the voice-overs that Toni and I recorded and complete the final steps of the editing! Unfortunately for me, I was not as close to the end as I thought I was. Animaker was very picky about which formats it would allow audio clips to be in, and ours were the wrong ones. After a bit of searching and a few frustrated grunts, I was able to convert the files into the correct format and move onto the final editing steps. Once I put them into the video, however, all of the animations that I had made were bumped out of order or did not match up how they were supposed to. I had to backtrack a bit, but thankfully fixing this was a bit easier than I expected, and I was able to finish up the video fairly quickly after that.
Although we were not able to meet in person, Toni and I were able to work together very well and come up with a final product that we are proud of. Thanks to FaceTime, texting, and email, we were able to pretend that we were together in person and take our minds off the crisis that we are all living through right now. With everything going on with COVID-19, I think that Toni and I were still able to utilize and understand the “Power of Two” while we worked on this project. Overall, I feel pretty good about our project, and I look forward to watching the videos of my peers!