What it's Like to Live in Takoma Park/Silver Spring: Cheder

So the assignment here started out being  to make a movie about what it was like to live in Silver Spring, but we were given a lot of leeway on how we wanted to do that, so I decided to focus more specifically on my Jewish community. As the video says, I'm a member of a parent taught Hebrew school. I've talked about it a little in my previous post about my bubble.

 The parents in Cheder rage from Atheists to Jews to Christians, all of who want to give their children a Jewish education. Because of this, we get a more diverse perspective from our teachers than one would get at many other more conventional Hebrew schools.

I've been going to Cheder for ten years now. I am the only person left from my class (age group) at this point. After having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, it is no longer required to come to Cheder, so everyone else my age has stopped coming. I continue to go to Cheder because I really enjoy the community it provides. For me, Cheder is a group of supportive families who I know will look out for and care about me. This year, because I don't have anyone else in my age group, I was given the opportunity to decide what I wanted to learn about, so I am studying women in the Torah, a topic which personally interests me.

The video shows clips of each of the classes at Cheder (except for the first and second graders).
The first class shown is leaning about Jewish immigration to America and specifically discussing the role that Jews played in the labor movement.
 The second class shown is learning about Sodom and Gomorrah. The teacher is explaining that the name of a character is not given in the text so one would have to look at the midrash (the rabbi's interpretation of the text.
The third class is of a Hebrew class in which the students are learning the colors.
The forth class is another Hebrew class in which students are discussing the vocabulary for objects around the classroom, specifically the word for floor (transliterated to reetzpah).

The audio from these clips is somewhat difficult to understand. Listening to it at a higher volume could be helpful.

Capture the Fall

This week I made my Capture the Fall video for media class. I used a flip camera to film it.

Here's a list of my shots:
1. colorful trees
2. my brother riding his bike
3. my mom walking our dog
4. a lawn display
5. a leaf pile along the street
6. fallen leaves
7. a spring with leaves in it at a park
8. my brother swinging
9. a tiny stream at the park
10. my brother walking
11. my brother throwing pine needles
12. a pretty sidewalk chalk drawing
13. more fallen leaves

Unlike some of the videos that I've seen for this project, my video doesn't tell a story or have any overarching theme besides fall. The clips that I used were things that I associate with fall in general. My favorite clip is the one of my brother throwing pine needles into the air. It looks staged, but it's actually not. It's just the type of thing that my brother does. I brought the camera to the park with me to film and  looked over at my brother and that's what he was doing.

There are a couple things that I didn't put into my Capture the Fall project that I wish that I could have. For me, fall is strongly associated with waking up and coming homes from school when it's dark. Unfortunately I kept forgetting to take my camera with  my to school, so I never got that footage.

One of the biggest challenges I faced when making this video was using the editing software, WeVideo. This is only the second video that I've ever edited so I still don't really know what I'm doing. I don't own any editing software so I had to use a free online software, WeVideo. WeVideo proved to be very glitchy. Some  of the clips would freeze as I tried to edit them so that when I tried to watch it in the editor, it would go through a couple clips and then freeze. In addition, the editor wouldn't play the transitions that I inserted between clips. Although the transitions wound up working when the video was exported to YouTube, I could only hope that they worked right because WeVideo would just skip over them.  

5X5 Triathlon

1. Green caps running into the ocean
2. Gold caps running into the ocean
3. Transition area
4. Bikers
5. Finish line

I was inspired to film my 5X5 while at a triathlon that my dad was doing. I borrowed a friends iPhone to film it. I used WeVideo, a web-based video editor to edit my footage. This was my first time ever editing anything, so I had a bit of a hard time at first getting used to the software, but I caught on pretty quickly.

I like the way that my 5X5 turned out. I wish that the shots were a bit more steady, but generally, I think that it turned out well.

I honestly don't have any big idea's for our next project. It might be fun to make something based on a similar idea to the 5X5 but maybe with a less strict format, that was unifies by a common theme or emotion.