Critical reflection
In my video I attempted to look at the phenomenon of gamification through a learning perspective. I deliberately decided not to make too much of an emphasis on academic learning because I wanted to frame everything in a way that would reflect our daily experiences. After all, every day we learn something new, and it does not necessarily happen consciously all the time. How successfully you are able to learn has a lot to do with your ability to concentrate. This is the issue I have devoted the introduction in the video to. I made the shots just a little bit longer, and put a few blank spaces between some of them in order to demonstrate by example how uncomfortable we sometimes get when we need to keep our attention focused on something. The second part weaves gamification into the context of reduced attention span and examines their relationship and impact on people.
I am a big proponent of pleasant imagery which does not always have to necessarily fully correlate with the subject matter but rather induce a certain mood instead. This is why I have decided to scout the Internet looking for some high quality HD footage of whatever seemed appropriate to me. There are numerous websites that host such footage and allow downloading it for free and using it in all sorts of projects, as long as they are non-commercial which the video embedded into this post happens to be. With this kind of a little detached visuals I thought I had to be careful choosing the appropriate music; I opted for a very subtle ambient score. Freemusicarchive.org has an immense collection of free music available for download, and another great thing about this website is that most of the tracks are licensed under the Creative Commons license meaning that they can be modified and used in just about anything.
Before even choosing which sources to study I tried to envision the thesis I wanted to put forward as clear as possible in my head. After that I drafted a plan in which I tried to state the points I felt I wanted to touch upon in the video; then I reviewed the list of sources and decided which ones were the most appropriate for helping me drive the message home. I did not want the video to become an outlet for relaying ideas from the sources, so I did my best to first synthesize the knowledge I acquired in my mind and then sort of channel it through my perspective. Nevertheless, I still felt that a few direct quotations will help me solidify my argument and add more weight to it.
Perhaps, the greatest challenge after my laptop’s CPU throttling because of all the HD stuff happening in the video editor was for me to somehow connect written messages I came up with to the imagery underneath them. At few points in the video I did it quite literally with the footage directly reflecting the meaning of the message. Most of the frames thought turned out more subtle. I had a script for the video which I developed using my plan from the preparation stage with some ideas for frames and transitions, but the whole thing began taking real shape the moment I loaded the first raw footage file into the editor and I felt like not following the script at all times. Sometimes (like in case with volume analogy) the actual footage created the message I put forward which just seemed to miraculously align with the idea for the video I had in mind. Right at this moment the video is still exporting and although I am trying to think about all the things I have learned they seem to still be making their way to the place where I could finally acknowledge them. In a way, they are still exporting too. What I am sure of though is that I really need a laptop that can properly handle video editing.
