Learning Project: Shape 6

I “Rose” to the Occasion

As promised, this week I ventured away from the animal kingdom and looked for a good origami flower video to try. I thought I’d try a different approach this week and went onto Pinterest and did a search for flower origami. As per usual, Pinterest did not disappoint and there was a plethora of projects that popped up. Most looked way beyond my ability level but I found a couple that I thought I could handle. Unfortunately they did not include video instructions (which apparently is key for me) and instead just had step by step photos. I won’t get into it too much but here are my failed flower attempts.

Back to good old reliable YouTube. I found a flower video that I thought looked much more manageable by YouTube user Ventuno Art. This was by far the most aesthetically pleasing origami video I’ve seen yet. The video itself has an almost nostalgic feel to it with a beautiful piano melody playing. It’s like watching a music video. The video went through the steps pretty quickly so I had to pause a lot during it, but any shortcomings in instructional quality is made up by the cinematography of the whole thing. The music really is beautiful!

To document this week’s shape, I was tasked with using an app or tool that I had not used before. I don’t even know where to start with this task. This turned into a three-hour long wild goose chase. I have a Chromebook so I did Google search after Google search trying to find a good (free) video editor for Chromebooks. I must have downloaded and deleted about five different apps. Every time I tried one, it either required a paid subscription in order to have any useful capabilities (even though it was advertised as free) or it just wouldn’t work. I don’t know if it’s my inexperience showing or what, but I was getting frustrated to no end. I also have a Windows-based desktop PC so I thought it might work better to try a Windows-based app. I found one called VideoScribe that uses photos instead of video. This app “draws” your photos for you that you can put together into a video. You can set it to music and even add text. It was getting a bit late in the day (on a Saturday night no less) and I was getting pretty tired so I’ll be honest, I didn’t explore this app as thoroughly as I would have liked to. The way it works is you import your images into the app.

There are different options for how you want your picture to appear. They can slide in from the side or appear to be drawn. I chose “draw” for all of my pictures.

For each picture you can change how you want it to appear, how long it stays, and how it transitions to the next picture. These changes can be made when you import the photo or there’s a quick option to make these changes.

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At any time you can also rearrange the order of photos.

Overall I thought this was a very user-friendly app. It had a lot of stock music options to choose from (although I wish I could have found that beautiful piano melody from the flower YouTube video) and it was very easy to export for me to share. I didn’t explore the text option but from what I can tell there is an option to add text to each photo as well. I would recommend this app to anyone looking for this sort of capability. The biggest downfall is you have to pay for the app in order to remove the watermark and use this app for more than a week. I downloaded the trial version and only have it for one week. Here is my final result.

As you can see from the video, I ended up making three of these flowers. Each flower is folded from five different pieces of paper. Needless to say I had become extremely proficient at folding the petals by the time I got to the fifteenth petal. In my first Learning Project post I had mentioned I wanted to work my way to a multi-piece project so I’m happy to say I’ve achieved that goal. 

If anyone has any suggestions for good (free) Chromebook video editing software (that actually works), I would love to hear from you!

Oh and as an aside, because this was the day after Valentine’s Day, I tried folding a heart which I think is super cute. These little cuties might be popping up around the house, in my kids’ lunch boxes, in birthday cards, in the envelopes when I pay my bills…