With the theme of Week 10 being Agile, I felt I was in for an easy week — a chance to catch up as I’d fallen behind slightly with my studies.
Agile Development is something I’ve been practising since about 2008/9. I was trained in Enterprise Agile at Symbian Software then involved in the roll-out across the entire business before becoming Product Owner to two Agile teams: one local and one remote. As Symbian no longer exists, the only document I’ve found relating to this system was written by one of my colleagues at the time and presented at the Scrum Gathering at Munich in October 2009 . I later ran my own business using the same system and when I joined my current employer I rolled it out to the Development Team within the first two months.
The reason I mention this isn’t to boast but rather to offer an explanation as to why I will find it difficult to show evidence of learning for this week. Instead I devoted the study time for this week to completing the Research and Communities of Practice modules then technical preparation for the final assignment.
For the assignment I want to try something I’ve not done before: to overlay myself as a talking head on the presentation in much the same way as a Creator will show picture in picture on YouTube or streaming via Twitch. After a quick search I found a product called VCam by XSplit that uses a webcam or mobile phone camera to capture video, remove the background and appear as a virtual camera. The ‘Record’ feature in PowerPoint can use the audio and video feed from the VCam virtual camera to add a narration overlay onto your slides. The best part is it only cost me about £5 for a month’s license which will more than cover me for this upcoming assignment.
I’ve embedded the first attempt below…
I thought this was a reasonable attempt but need to improve for the assignment. Over the next few weeks I plan to create more video entries for this blog to accompany the prose as I really need the experience of talking into the camera.
This first attempt took over 2 hours to record. I feel it’s very flat and lacks the energy needed to captivate and engage with the viewer. This can be quite a dry subject to present so it needs something to lift it a little. Maybe that’s the photographer in me talking; my Fashion Photography tutor, Bruce Smith (caution — site may not be work safe), always used to say “the model will give you back only as much energy as you put in.” This mantra also holds true for presentations and I very much suspect video narration as well.
Clearly 2 hours for a simple voiceover is not sustainable so I’ve tweaked my workflow slightly. Instead of writing the presentation, recording it then writing the blog I’ve found I can significantly reduce the time (and hence the effort) by writing the presentation, writing the blog and then recording the narration.
It worked too — the second video was recorded in a single run through on the first take, the third took a few takes but was still much, much faster than 2 hours.
If I’m brutally honest with myself I feel I can (and indeed must) do a lot better. That will come with practice, lots of practice, and when it does, these first vlogs will be re-recorded.
References
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
