Friday, May 09, 2008

Shadow Stabbing #11: Editing


According to my plan, I am supposed to make another five videos before I take a break for the summer. I wanted to make sixteen in all; that is, I had given myself a kind of sixteen week challenge, which I thought would run to the end of May. In order to stick to that deadline, I'm going to lower my ambitions a bit and settle for 14 altogether. That is, I have three more to go.

(Something similar is happening with the writing group I have organized. As we near the end of the semester, we have renegotiated the ultimate deadline for submissions to journals. I am also trying to get the authors to rethink how many papers they will manage to submit. In all cases, it's about whether or not a realistic plan can be made through which to realize their ambitions. The idea is to cut your losses early.)

At least one more of this season's videos will use the same format as this one. And next year I want to make half of the videos like this, i.e., as real-time examples of actual editing. One of the most satisfying (and fun) parts of my current job is running a weekly writing workshops with two groups of PhD students. For an hour and a half, we edit a short sample of text provided by a participant, displaying the Word document on the wall using a beam projector.

I'm sure there's a better of way of recording the screen image, and even the method I settled on here could be executed better. (If you blow the image up to full screen you should be able to read what it says. I wrote a post about it on Wednesday.) I'm also going to decide on a quick and easy way to make the lead-in and the sign-off.

In any case, I hope you enjoy it. Do keep searching.

And keep writing.

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