journal

This year I was a senior at the marine academy of science and technology. I took systems engineering two as my main course of study. For my project I decided to make a video that depicted the steps to building a fishing rod. My idea was to make a video that showed the steps to building a rod with oscillating guides. This means that the guides turn to transfer the force of the pull of the fish. What this does is makes the rod lighter than a regular one. The reason I chose this was because there was never a video made depicting the steps to building a rod with oscillating guides
There was many different designs I came up with but finally I picked to build two rods one regular and one oscillating. For my design brief and specifications and limitations I decided that the video could be no longer than two hours and it had to show every step of building a rod. My mentor Bob Harris builds fishing rods for a living and he showed me how to do everything. He helped me out with my research and loaned me a few fishing rod building videos to show how they managed to make a video out of something so boring.
For my testing procedures I made a test that people could take after they watched the video to assess how much they learned from actually watching it. I decided that if ten people took the test I would have a fair assessment of how my video did. Their scores varied from fifty to one hundred. I feel that people could learn everything there was to know if they really sat down and watched it with their heart and soul.
As far as the precursors for my assignment went I feel I met all of my expectations on the design brief, except for the fact that I was never able to capture the oscillating guides on film. I did manage to build another rod in time and edit the film so it just shows every step of the rod building process. The reason behind this was that there was uploading problems with the first camera that I used. This was the major flaw in my project, I should have checked if the camera was compatible with mac computers before I began filming my project. If I were to do this again I would make sure to use a higher quality camera. Also I would film in a controlled environment rather than doing a voice over on the film. Overall what I learned is that it is a lot harder to make a film then people think. It takes a lot of setting up and taking down every time you film. Also i never thought about all the problems I would have with film editing and converting files from mac to pc. I will make sure never to do this again.