Project Learning Goals

1. Technology
   • iMovie ñ Participants able to import images, arrange images in sequence, record sounds, create transitions, create titles
     
   • Photoshop ñ Participants able to use majority of tools (pencil, paintbrush, lasso, magic wand, selection marquee, rubber stamp, eraser, zoom); manage document settings (dpi, image size, file format); manage layers (create new, make invisible, change order); and use filters
     
   • Scanning ñ Participants able to operate scanner (place image on scanner correctly, scan image into graphics program, manage scanner settings)
     
2. Life Skills
   • Final list to be determined through dialogue between instructor and participants
     
     • • brainstorming
         
       • project planning
         
       • time management
         
       • peer review
         
       • peer to peer teaching
         
3. Creative skills
   • To be determined through dialogue between instructor and participants
     
   • Possibilities
     • telling a story through sound, images and text
       
     • maintaining design journal
       
     • storyboarding
       
     • creating sounds through alternative and experimental means
       
     • 2 dimensional composition
       
     • basic drawing
       
     • collage
       
     • creative photography with digital camera and disposable camera to take home

Building commitment among participants

• Frequent take-homes from lab - (ex: printed work) fosters a connection between the girls' time at the lab and the rest of their life, as they see their work at home and others ask and remark on what they've created
  
• Ownership of space ñ (ex: space for belongings in the closet, a space for their groups' work on the wall) encourages girls to think of lab as their own, a place they want to be a part of and contribute to
  
• Leadership roles ñ (ex: co-hosts for the kick-off party, identified experts in various technologies) recognize the unique abilities of individual girls and provide an opportunity for them to be ìin chargeî in a way that doesn't happen so frequently at school or elsewhere
  
• Connecting with others ñ (ex: through group activities, working together on projects) The connections the girls build with each other and with the lab facilitator are the most powerful incentives for them to continue their participation at the lab.
  

Day by Day Curriculum ñ Who Am I?

Day 1: Kick-off event/ gathering/ video-watching

Opening
Gather the attendees into a circle. Welcome by Lab teacher and, ideally, a young woman or women known by the teacher, who can be asked to be co-host(s)

Activity #1
Show examples of experimental/ alternative forms of personal narrative, such as:

• Keeping It Reel video (YLI)
  
• slide shows in iMovie by YouthMAP youth staff
  
• youthfilms.com
  The Internet partner of the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS) . Here you can watch streaming videos created by GIFTS students, many of which have screened and won awards locally and internationally.
• Studentfilms.com
  A film student at Boston University started this site in August 1998
• ifilm.com
  A lot of mainstream and low-brow stuff; you'll have to really search for personal narrative/ independent pieces.
  
  For a review of digital distributors: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/41/index4a_page5.html?tw=multimedia
  

Food
Post butcher paper and marker outside lab, next to event flyers, where girls can make suggestions before the event for event refreshments

Reflection
Group discussion of the videos, facilitated by Kirthi and her co-host(s).

Activity #2
Girls & facilitator brainstorm:
What are the questions we ask when we want to find out who someone is? Use the following questions in the brainstorm activity to challenge the girls to ask non-traditional questions and give unique answers.

Who are the girls and young women who we admire? (famous people, girls we know) How do we describe who they are?

What roles do we play in our lives? How do we describe ourselves in these different roles? Who are you as a sister? Daughter? Friend? Student? Worker?

Who have I been at different times in my life? When I was in 1 st grade? When I was 10?

What are the influences in my life? Family? Culture? Religion? School?

Girls pair up, interview each other using the above questions, and then introduce their partner to the group.

Closing
Girls invited to participate in ìWho Am I?î multimedia slide show project.

Take home
Girls asked to bring something next time which is important to them or is a symbol of who they are. (a photo, a piece of jewelry, a particular T-shirt, a rock or shell)


Day 2-3: Audio/ Visual Self-Representation Activity

Opening
In a circle of the whole group, each girl shares the item they brought and explains their connection with it.

Activity #1
Girls pair up to scan their item, resulting in a digital image of each girl's important object
Using Photoshop, scan the object at 72 dpi. Save the file as a jpeg.

In pairs, girls discuss and, if needed, write down what they'd like to record to go along with the image of their object

Using iMovie, each girl imports her scanned image and records her voice narrative to go along with it. Instructor may choose to have girls go through the first section of the iMovie tutorial (which comes with the program) to learn the names of the components of the user interface (playhead, shelf for clips, preview screen).

Importing image
Open iMovie
File menu- New project
Name the project (name and save using file saving conventions of the lab)
File menu ñ import file
In the dialogue box, browse to find the saved scanned image
Click the import button; the image will appear in the shelf
Click on the image and drag it to the timeline


Adding a voice clip or other recorded sound

iMovie allows you to record your own voice or other sounds to use in your movie. To record audio, follow these steps < http://ali.apple.com/als/k6mult/steps.html >:

1. Check to see whether your computer has a built-in microphone or an external microphone. You need one or the other to record your voice.
2. Make sure that your computer is set to record from that source. Choose Control Panels from the Apple menu, then choose Sound from the submenu. Click the Input tab and make your selection in the Input panel. (You can also select your input device by opening the Sound Strip module on the Control Strip.)
3. Open your iMovie project.
4. Position the playhead where you want the narration to begin.
5. Click the Audio button to open the Audio panel, if necessary.
6. Click the Record Voice button and speak into your microphone.
   
   Viewing the work
   Click on the full screen button to view the audiovisual slide
   

Activity #2
Girls are invited to designate an area in the closet where they can store personal items while at the lab and where they can keep hard copies of their work

Take home
A print out of her important object

Reflection
What 2 things did I like about today? What 2 things did I not like about today? Ask girls to type their responses into the computer (if they feel comfortable typing) and print them out, without their names on them. (Anonymity for the first evaluation will allow more candid responses. As the group builds trust, the need for anonymity will decrease.)

Day 4-6: Storyboarding

Openings

As the girls enter the lab, ask them to get their design journals, and draw their personalities in colors, shapes and texture
Gather the group in a circle. Ask each girl to describe her ideal day.

Activity #1
Introduce storyboard idea. Ask girls if they've ever used or created a storyboard before. If anyone has, ask them to share with the group how it worked. Show an example of a completed storyboard. Pass out storyboards with 4-6 frames, and ask each girl to create a simple storyboard their ideal day. Discuss what, in addition to what the described in the opening, this could include:

• What time would you wake up?
• What would you eat during the day?
• Where would you go?
• Who would you see?
• What would you do?
  

For each frame of the storyboard, ask the girls to include an image or colors, (e.g. red and orange for eating hot chips); words (descriptive words or a description of the scene/ image); and ideas for noises (recorded voice, music, created sounds)

After the girls complete their storyboards, the girls come back into a group circle and each girl shares her work.

Take home
Encourage each girl to decide which part of their ideal day they can make happen in the next week. (Example: eating shrimp fried rice for breakfast)

Activity #2
After sharing their work, the girls scan in the frames of their storyboards.

The girls import the scans into iMovie and record the sounds that go with each frame.

Days 7-10 Begin Again/ Iteration

What more could we put together in iMovie to tell the story of Who Am I?

Project Planning

• Generate ideas among participants about who they are: (filling out the ideas they've already generated on days 1-6) What do I think about? What is important to me? Who is important to me? What do I do with my days? How do I see my future?
• Brainstorm elements to be included in slide show in text, images and sound. Begin developing storyboards for full iMovie presentation
  

Creating the slide show

• Learn to use the hardware and software while creating
• Digital photos of the girls taken of each other and themselves
• Scanned 3D objects and images
• Original compositions in Photoshop
• Edited photographs in Photoshop
• Voice recordings to narrate/ complement iMovie slide show
  

Creating sounds

• Experimenting with sounds created through tapping, scratching, voice, and other means developed by the girls in collaboration with Kirthi and each other
• Possible sources of images
• Snapshots of loved ones, places visited, important places
• Scans of 3D objects- faces, sports equipment, stuffed animals or other figurines from home, jewelry or barrettes
• Photos taken for project: my friends, my family, my school, my favorite place
• Original compositions in Photoshop
• my favorite activity
• my personality in colors, shapes and texture
• a collage of the words that describe me
  

Mid-Project Sharing

• Each girl shares her work so far with the rest of the group
• Group members share their responses to the work in progress
  

Completing the slide shows

In addition to importing images and recording sounds, the girls will explore cropping clips and adding music, sound effects, transitions, and titles.

Cropping a video clip

When you want to crop the beginning and/or end of an iMovie video clip, you first select the part of the video clip that you want to keep. There are several ways you can do this.

1. Click to select the clip you want to edit.
2. Click and drag below the scrubber bar. Two triangular crop markers appear. Drag the crop markers to where you want the clip to begin and end. When you release the mouse button, part of the scrubber bar has changed from blue to yellow. The portions outside of the crop markers will be deleted when you crop the clip.
3. To increase or decrease the edited area frame by frame, click either crop marker once, then press the Right Arrow or Left Arrow key on the keyboard to move the crop marker.
   Note: If you change your mind and want to undo what you selected, choose Select None from the Edit menu.
4. Choose Crop from the Edit menu. The excess footage has been removed from your clip.
   
   Another way to select the area you want to crop is to move the playhead to where you want the clip to start. Holding down the Shift key, click at the point of the playhead on the scrubber bar and drag to select the portion you want to keep.

Note: If you want to remove a section in the middle of the clip instead of the beginning or the end, you can use a different technique to delete that portion. Instead of selecting the area you want to keep, select the area you want to delete with the crop markers, then choose Clear from the Edit menu. The area between the crop markers is removed.

Adding music from a CD

You can add clips from an audio CD to your iMovie projects.

1. Click the Audio button to open the Audio panel, if it's not already open.
2. Insert an audio CD in the computer's CD-ROM drive.
   A list of tracks appears.
3. Click to play any track in the list.
4. Move the playhead to the point in your movie that you want the music to start from.
5. Click the audio CD track that you want to add, then click the Record Music button. You hear the track playing and see it being added to one of the two audio tracks.
6. Click Stop when you want to stop the recording.
7. To crop the recorded music track, place the pointer on the triangle at the right end of the music track and drag to the left. Once you have determined the length you want, choose Crop from the Edit menu.
   
   Tip: You can add a fade in or fade out effect. To do this, first select the audio track you recorded and then select the Fade In or Fade Out option, or both.
   

Adding a sound effect

iMovie comes with a number of prerecorded sound effects that you can use in your projects. The sound effects are located in the Audio panel. You can download many more sound effects from the iMovie Web site at www.apple.com/imovie and use them in your projects.

To add a sound effect to your project, follow these steps:

1. Click the Audio button to open the Audio panel, if necessary.
2. Scroll through the list of sound effects, clicking whichever ones you'd like to hear, until you have located a sound effect you'd like to use in your project.
3. Click the timeline viewer tab (the icon with the clock).
4. Move to the spot where you would like to add the sound effect. Drag the sound effect you want from the Audio panel and place it in one of the two audio tracks in the desired location.
   
   

Celebrate with final showing

• Include refreshments. Invite girls to plan what they want to eat.
• Make slide shows available for viewing in lab
• Invite friends and family of girls and friends of the lab
  
  Post-Who Am I Project option: Who are We?
  

Bringing together components of individual Who Am I? Stories into group Who Are We? Story

If there are more than 4 girls, break them into small groups

In each group, girls take turns sharing their Who Am I? multimedia piece with the others and make group decision about what to include in the group work

After viewing a girl's piece, the group discusses which portions of the piece they would like to bring into the group piece. In this way, the group "pulls" in pieces from each girl's work to the group piece instead of the individual girl "pushing" her piece into the group work

After putting the individual pieces together into a first version of the group Who Are We? piece, the group views the piece, then discusses what they'd like to add to the group piece to bring it together. These group elements could include:

• Photo(s) of the entire group
• Voice or other recordings made by the group
• A poem or other writing created collaboratively by the group
  

Who Am I? Curriculum by Natalie Seer in collaboration with Girls Inc San Leandro for CompuMentor