The animation is finished!!!

After a long friday night of finishing and fine tuning the animation, I then struggled through two days of swearing loudly, and repeatedly at my computer, and youtube, trying to compress the incredibly large file to something small enough for youtube to handle, until finally, on sunday night, the finished product was ready to upload. (Though I have been siting here for nearly half an hour waiting for it to do so...)



Here it is, the long awaited finished product of several strenuous hours of work on my, Cody’s, Steven’s and Steph’s part. We all worked together to write, record and visually express the process that is cellular respiration.

From doing this project, I now have a ridiculously thorough understanding of cellular respiration. I first realized though, that perhaps I was spending too much time on this project, when I had my first dream about the electron transport chain, then the krebs cycle, then woke up all angry because they came in the wrong order.

I also learned a lot about working in a group on such a big project. I have done an animation like this before (photosynthesis), but then I was on my own. Having to work with other people on this was sometimes a challenge, mostly with trying to find times when all four of us could meet long enough to get something done. But except for a little pinch on time towards the end here, we managed to do it pretty well.

The original intent of this project was to put together an informative video about cellular respiration, that was simple enough for a high schooler to understand. As far as the content goes, I would say we were successful. But it was actually way harder than we thought to dumb down some of the steps, without taking away from the overall concept. Because of this, the writing took way longer than any of us expected, and was difficult to do as a group, as all of us had different ways we would word something. Again, we came out all right, but in the future, I think I would try delegating sections to individuals to summarize themselves on their own time, so we could have gotten started with the recording much sooner. The recording was by far the most enjoyable, as each of us now has a whole plethora of sound bites of us swearing after a failed attempt at saying succinate dehydrogenase.

Though the animation is not quite as smooth, and did not come out quite as nicely as I would have liked, I am still quite pleased with it, and I hope that it serves its purpose, and educates some kid out there trying to do his bio homework.