A Creative and Artful Life of Karl

Finding the creative and artful person in my everyday world is easy. Trying to tell a story about him is not.

Karl Schaefer is an Instruction Technology Teacher, a creative person who lives an artful life.

working with 5th graders to set up their ePortfolios

Karl lives on a farm, raises horses and dogs. He and his wife also take care of their fruits and vegetable gardens. He shares his produce with his children and grandchildren.

feed the horses every morning

Every morning, he feeds his horse and cleans their waste before he goes to work – as an Instructional Technologist.

the tractor is used to haul the horses’ manure to the area where it can be sun-dried and left to be fermented.

freshly tilted garden ready for the new planting

Karl loves teaching Middle School students, and working with faculty. However, at the end of the day, Karl goes back to his farm, and stays offline to maintain a balanced life. He has two grandchildren, and he makes sure that they have plenty of time playing in the nature, digging dirt and planting watermelons.

Here is an un-edited footage of Karl talking about his farm and grandchildren. Although it did not make it to the documentary, it is very inspiring! It is difficult not to envy his artistic balance of family and work.

I followed Karl to one of his classes, a meeting, and his office. At the end, I collected 2 hours worth of video footage and 60 stills.  Compiling and editing them into a 5-minute documentary was a challenge. After I had a virtual story-board in my head about the approach and sequence, selecting the clips and editing them was time-consuming, but not short of technical difficulties and ‘exciting’ moments…. including abandoning iMovie altogether and picked up Camtasia for the editing tool, and risked losing five hours worth of work at one point when it crashed and returned with an ‘unexpected error’ that could not be recovered.

Fortunately, I only lost 10 minutes of editing, and was able to reproduce it and finished the first version an hour later.

As I was getting ready to post it to YouTube, I noticed the ‘detail’ in the assignment to include a blog with reflections on the process and product!

I had fun figuring out the voice-over, and other editing techniques in Camtasia. It was mostly intuitive, and the online tutorials were helpful.

The product….? I felt that it did not do Karl any justice!

I wanted to cover his farm life, but was not able to work out the time. I was glad that Karl found, from his albums, a precious video of an afternoon with his grandchildren while two rainbows appeared above the farmhouse. I was able to incorporate that into the documentary.

I also gave a facelift to Karl’s own video of ‘Search me’ from two years ago, and used it for the opening and ending of this documentary. I owe Karl for all his help with my quest in becoming a 21st Century teacher and stays abreast with the technology.

Here is Karl.