Making Movies

Movies can be very useful in creating materials for multimedia production, and firing up the imaginations of your students. We live in the age of cinema and film, amd empowering students to work in this medium can elicit very powerful expressive ideas.



Somewhere Out There


iMovie has provided a dynamic way of creating a movie, and its use of the Ken Burns effect makes it possible to use still images as dynamic sources for content. Ken Burns is the creator of documentaries who has often had to rely on still images for content since much of his subject matter did not have film or video clips available. In such cases, one either must rely on still images or recreate moments (docudrama) or develop animations. In fact, iMovie's Ken Burn's effect is a way of animating still images so that it appears that the camera is panning a scene or zooming in and out of closeups.

Moviemaker packaged with Professional XP has wonderful transitions and can create zoom in and zoom out using the "ease in" and "ease out" effects. You can stack effects to increase their range.

Both Moviemaker and iMovie can create titles over images or over blank frames. The duration of each frame can be changed by typing it in for Moviemaker or by typing or using a sliding controller in iMovie.

Choose a theme or idea for your movie. Use your sound editing program to create a sound track for your movie. For purposes of the movie you are making, edit the music sound track that it is about 1' to 1'30" in duration. You can drag your soundtrack into iMovie and into Moviemaker. In both applications the soundtrack can be viewed in the Timeline view. The other view is the clip or slide view, also referred to in Moviemaker as the Storyboard. For this movie, we are letting the soundtrack determine the length of the movie.

Select images that relate to your theme or idea for the movie and place them into the movie by dragging them into place, or in iMovie use the iPhoto interface to access images to treat with or without the Ken Burns effect. As you determine the start and end positions and times of the clip, select apply and they will be rendered (written) for your movie.

When you have your storyboard (clip or slide view) complete, add your title, effects and transitions. The transitions will affect the timing of the clips (a transition robs time from the two clips it connects), so you may need to experiment to make the sound and images end together. Save as a movie for the web, preferably as a streaming movie. Streaming means the movie can be played before it is fully downloaded. It streams the data while the movie is playing. Windows machines will save as wmv files, while Macs will create mov files. A free application for Macs called Flip4Mac converts wmv files to mov files.

You can post your movie by embedding it, using the same code you used for embedding sound files. You can also create links to movie files.