Using New Tools to Document a Chess Win!

It is now week 5 on my learning project journey of learning chess and I am still in the beginning stages of understanding the game. I continue to play chess games focusing on a couple new techniques each week then playing a few games to implement those strategies.  This week I focused on the mid-game part of chess where I set up aggressive tactics and strategies to capture pieces and pressure the king. Using double forking, supporting pieces and controlling the middle were the focuses for this week’s techniques, which came from a couple of videos from Chess.com.

Videos like Everything You Need to Know 3: Tactics and Strategy and 4 Exercises to Become a Tactical Genius are two videos that I watched a couple times and applied their new lessons along with my opening strategies and understanding that I have in my toolbox from weeks prior.  I continue to play lots and learn from that website.

I wanted to find a way to document my learning process thus far and I thought no better way than to record a game.  However, since games take at least 20 minutes, I figured a sped up or time-lapse video would be best. I wanted to record a victory so I set the computer on level 2, even though recently, I have been playing on a difficulty level of 3. However, for this game, I kept it a bit simpler so I could get a win and the video would not be too long and hard to see when sped up.

Recording my match, I used a couple of apps that were already installed on my Mac, QuickTime Player and iMovie.  I was searching around on the internet on how to screencast on my computer and found that QuickTime Player could do the job without downloading an app.  Then to make a time-lapse video, I found a couple apps that could do the job like Hustl but eventually, I saw that iMovie had enough editing features where I could speed up the video to make it look like a time-lapse.

QuickTime Player has a couple options that allow you to record the entire screen, part of your screen and take screenshots as well. The picture below and the one later on of the iMovie platform was a screenshot with this program.  I found this was the easiest part of making my video. The app is very easy to use and simple to navigate and can do a couple of different useful things like screencast and screenshots.  Simply go to File, then to a New Screen Recording and away you go.

iMovie, on the other hand, was a whole different struggle, as editing videos is a hard process as there are lots of moving parts.  I watched a video on Youtube to help me work around adding the video into the software and finding the editing tools.  Overall it is not that difficult of a process but I still needed some guidance, unlike the QuickTime Player.  There is a lot of options and editing that can be done through iMovie that could be useful. In the left and corner of the screenshot, there is a timer button that allows you to custom speed up or slow down the rate by simply changing the percentage.  This is how I made my video that is at the bottom of this post!

Below is my video of my Chess Win! These apps and their abilities and my skills of chess are all on display in this one video. Enjoy my chess game!