It’s often the case that educators are put off from creating their own digital content due to lack of familiarity with technology. Recently, for a new book I published, I created a promotional video and posted it to YouTube. The book is called Urban Voices and the video was a three-minute sequence featuring my reading of the opening poem in the book, titled Metro Cityscape Panorama. The poem takes a commuter’s view of working every day in a large city. Check it out at the link at the foot of this post, and then read on:

The soundscape and my vocals were recorded using a fairly inexpensive set of recording equipment I purchased online during the lockdown. It consists of an Audient iD4 digital 2-in 2-out interface (this connects by USB cable to my laptop computer to the microphone, headphones and other inputs/outputs), a pair of ATH-M40X professional monitor headphones and an AT2035 cardioid condenser microphone (both made by Audio-Technica). The bundle comes packaged as the AT2035 Studio complete with several cables and a microphone stand attachment. I purchased a boom microphone stand at the same time.

The soundscape behind my vocals was created using Garage Band – it hosts a vast range of audio samples for drums, keyboards and other instruments and a few hours spent exploring how this desktop multi-track recording system works is time well spent. 

The video footage was created on iMovie on my Apple Macbook Air, but there are other similar software tools such as Movie Maker that can be used on pc. I added the MP3 soundtrack I had created on Garage Band first, and then built the video clips in around it on a separate channel. The video clips were all found fairly quickly on Vivedo and are copyright free with attribution. Once I had created the MP4 file via iMovie, it was a simple matter of uploading it to YouTube. 

Here’s the video. 

Technical requirements by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.