Edd+White's+Page

This I Believe... media type="youtube" key="u4m-ug1C_2Q?hl=en" height="349" width="425" align="center"

Education is one of our most valuable tools. While I haven't necessarily enjoyed all the instruction I've received or the schools I've attended, I can say without a doubt that the things I've learned, can learn, and will learn from this arduous process, will give me much to offer the world and myself. It has already opened my mind to many harsh realities and beautiful truths that have impacted the perceptions I make greatly. As such, I believe in improving the overall quality of our education and making resources more available and affordable to all levels of society throughout the world.

Unfortunately, A large imbalance exists today in the distribution of school materials and qualified teachers worldwide. From looking at small communities to the entire planet, we can see that distribution is confined and controlled among wealthy communities, states, and countries. For example, in New York City spending is only $8,300 per pupil, despite the greater needs of its students, while Westchester County, a wealthy suburb to its north, spends $12,600. Translate these sums to a class of students, and then to an entire school, and the differences become much more substantial. On top of that, many countries outside of our own receive little to no funding at all, while the “upper-echelon” countries thrive in comparison. It’s problems like these that cause the loss of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potential minds world wide. Generally, students are unable to afford higher education, attend high school which aren't accredited, or even can't afford school supplies. In the most extreme cases, their village doesn’t have a school with modern forms of education and certification or doesn't even have a school at all.

We are in a politically and economically unstable time of social and scientific advancement right now. We're running head first into an uncertain new age of rapidly advancing technology, tense world economies, evolving scientific theory, and complex global political communications, with threats such as global warming, terrorism and war looming above us. Now, almost more than ever, In order to overcome ourselves and the changing world around us, we must strive to provide all with equal and equitable sources of education. Our goal should be to leave little to no wasted potential, to equally empower everyone to follow and achieve their ambitions. In the ideal form, an entirely self-sufficient human race could be achieved, which, in my mind, would have limitless potential. But despite the idealization, I believe that with enough support, education could drastically improve and potentially save the world in face of whatever may come

Production Process:

1) Written Portion: -There is one main element that should be taken note of here. I wanted the text to have a formal feel while still retaining a spoken sound, so I left the print style of the text much like that of a school paper (no bolds, no color changes, etc.), I kept the subject matter rather detailed and specific, and I kept personal statements somewhat minimal (though I wanted them in the paper for the spoken feel). I made this decision in connection with subject matter. Since my topic is rather serious, I wanted a serious/formal feeling within the writing (both visually and orally).

2)Graphic Portion: -I took great care in the pictures I chose for the slide show. I probably looked through several dozen before deciding on the ones I wanted to pair together and contrast. Each was chosen to visually represent points I bring up in the speech and to support statements I make. I also placed them together carefully and set them in a movie format, so that they could be timed to transition in accordance to certain dialogue changes. In order to do this, and over lay the visual effects with the audio, I created an iMovie with the slide show, set each slide to a certain time to match the audio, and imported the movie into GarageBand. This took some tinkering since I originally made the slide show as a power point, but once I got it transferred to iMovie, it was rather easy to transfer to GarageBand.

3)Audio Portion: -I probably put the most time into this portion. First, I went through quite a few takes to get the sound I wanted for my dialogue. To get the best quality I could, I covered myself and my laptop with blankets (for a homemade sound room) and did the recording underneath it all. After I finished the dialogue recording, I made some modifications to increase pauses and smoothen certain parts, then I locked it and set it to a music track which I created from scratch. To do this, I started a separate Garageband file and created the song there. This allowed me to save the song and import it into the other GarageBand Movie project as a single track (as opposed to several overlaid tracks). Once I had finished all of the audio parts (which took lots of tinkering to get the sound balances and qualities how I wanted), I imported the Dialogue and Music tracks into my GarageBand movie (which was imported from iMovie) and equalized the two tracks with my slide show movie. (Note: everything but the drum track was written and played by myself. i.e. two guitar tracks, bass track, and piano track, with track effect layers. Written in E major)

After each of these parts was finished and put together for the final result in GarageBand, I exported the GarageBand movie into iTunes and saved the file as a .m4v. This was necessary to get the whole thing onto the Wiki as one complete video. To do that, i took the .m4v and uploaded it to YouTube.com, so that the whole thing could finally be turned into a widget that could be placed onto the Wiki. It came to be a pretty complicated process of export/import transfers and file changes and I had to create a YouTube account, but I think it was well worth it and I'm proud of the results.