Project 365 and Project 52

For Christmas this year, Santa brought me a new iPhone 4S. I love it! It is so much faster then my older iPhone 3G and the High Definition camera is great. With this new tool, I have decided to commit myself to two year long projects this year as a New Year's resolution to hone my photography and filming skills.

Many of you have heard of Project 365, and I have had the app on my phone pretty much since I had purchased the older 3G, however, I never made it past two pictures on the yearly calendar. Well, with the new camera in the iPhone 4S, and our brand new daughter at home (now 3 months), it seems like a perfect match for this project. My plan is to take a picture of Elsa, our baby girl, next to a window each day for the Project 365. At the end, I would like to create a YouTube video of her growth throughout the year as the seasons change out the window. Hopefully I can share this project with my daughter when she is old enough to appreciate it. It's a long road, but so far I am 5 for 5.

This picture was taken before Project 365 started on January 1st.

My other year long goal is to work on my filming skills. I have always been a fan of the movies, and as a young boy I used my father's old video camera to make small movies using my sister's Barbie dolls, or my Lego sets in a stop motion scene, or reenacted fun scenes with my friends out in our backyard. Well, now that I am equipped with an HD camera in my pocket on the new iPhone 4S, I plan to create mini clips each week to better my skills in filming and play around with some apps for special effects. I think this task would be impossible, unless I quit my day job, to publish each day to YouTube, however, once a week seems manageable to me so I will call it Project 52.

This is a clip I created with a 5th grade student using the app "Action Movie" on the iPhone and a green screen to complete the backdrop.

My intent with these two year long projects is to hone my own skills, but to also use these as models to inspire other educators in and out of my district, as well as students to take learning beyond the classroom. I'm certainly not a professional photographer or filmographer, but it's important to share my trials and tribulations with students to showcase that it takes time and practice to get good at something. It's important that educators and schools allow students to try something and fail once or twice before they are expected to master something. This is something that seems to be escaping us in public education, and I fear that true learning, through real hands-on experimentation, may decrease in our curriculum unless we do something about it.

Reflection on Project 365 and Project 52

My first personal reflections of the project are that this will take a great deal of effort and time, but I believe it is worth it. In my Project 365 theme, I realized that I don't always get home in time to "see" the weather outside the window, and therefore you cannot see what it looks like in Maine at this time of year, however, daylight and time change may be something I will use to reinforce and skirt my problem. (Also, there is no snow on the ground right now to see in Southern Maine anyhow.)

On my clip above for my Project 52 entry, I realize that we need a bigger green screen. I would love to convert one of our double wide trailers "parked" outside of the school as an extended classroom into a production studio and paint the entire inside chroma key green for student projects. That way we wouldn't have to figure out where to hang the old green cloth, or find more green poster paper. I'll keep working though. After all, I have 365 days to better my skills. Cheers!