Project Update

Team PLM: Mike Kombate, Diana De La Paz, Gaby Lazo

Progress

Since our last blog post, our group has worked hard to develop a clearer theme to visualize with our project. We want to focus our project on a specific piece of media we found in the archives: “Carleton Today,” a film reel taken sometime between 1964 and 1967. Our primary theme will be developing a narrative of “Then and Now” by recreating many of the clips in the film and providing a voice-over narrative walking viewers through the campus — and with it, the character of Carleton — in the 60s and today. Furthermore, we intend to map the individual clips using ArcGIS and create a story map to add to the visualization and analysis of the campus’ growth and change since our specific media was recorded.

We are already hard at work at making this project a reality. In regards to the video, we have created a list of all of the shots, chosen the ones we plan to work with, noted the times in the video that each of them start at, and readied ourselves for filming and re-photography. We have cut all of the blank film from the footage, and plan to insert our new footage where the blank film currently takes up space. For the map, we have already started the process of collecting the latitudes and longitudes of each Carleton building/location featured in our footage so that we may enter the data into ArcMap and begin to refine the story map. In addition, we have set up a separate subdomain on Mike’s page where our final project may be displayed. We plan to begin filming this week, and the video editing is already in progress.

Problems and Solutions

Initially, we had intended to create a spreadsheet with the data for the map so that we could create a CSV file that could be directly uploaded to the mapping program. However, that process turned out to be more difficult to format correctly than we’d anticipated, and we could not get a CSV file to work. To fix the issue, we decided to map the points manually, finding the location data on Google Maps and just copy/pasting things like latitudes and longitudes. While this process is more tedious, we agreed that the StoryMap template looked better and served our purposes better than some of the alternatives we explored.

Additionally, we are running into some issues with cutting together the video. Again, the issue seems to be less one of ability and more one of time — to cut and save each separate clip is proving a hassle, at least on iMovie. We plan to explore a few other video editors like Adobe Premiere and online softwares to figure out if the process may be simplified.

We do anticipate that some shots are going to be difficult to film, but until we run into specific issues, we plan to charge valiantly on.

Tools and Techniques

We are currently working with three main applications to actualize our project: iMovie to edit our re-videography and add voiceover, ArcGIS to plot our video clips and any additional photos we find, and WordPress to ultimately display and navigate our project.

Our techniques include re-photography and re-videography, as we plan to recreate the same clips that were taken for “Carleton Today” in their same (or relatively similar) locations and present them side by side. Additionally, we are employing GIS mapping and geolocating in order to create our story map.

Deliverables

As of right now, we are on track to finish our project on time. We will hopefully finish the map (at least for the 60s clips) by the end of the week, and will start videotaping this and next week. The final edit will be tedious, but should be able to be realistically completed.