BP7_Commercial

Well, I did it!  I feel pretty accomplished.  I made my one minute commercial for the Web 2.0 tool Go Animate that I reviewed in a previous blog post.  Our assignment was to have one minute, no more, no less, and I got it.  Here is what I did:

First I shot footage of Go Animate in action using Screenflow.
Then I exported that footage to iMovie, but I still needed dialogue.
So, I opened Garage Band, chose the podcast feature, and went at it saying the lines I wrote for myself.
Then I imported my podcast, and layered into my movie.  I had to do some editing, but not very much.  I mostly edited out extra footage I shot with Screenflow.

All in all, the process seemed easier now that I knew more about iMovie.  So, I have discovered that 3 hours and 28 minutes that was a pain to get through was definitely worth it.  Now making a project in iMovie is less painful than it was before the tutorials.

Enjoy the movie.
(FYI--Upon my first attempt at uploading my movie into Blogger, the finished product was 1:01.  However, in iMovie the duration was one minute on the dot.  I went back into iMovie and shaved off what seemed like nanoseconds.  Let's see what attempt two is like...)
I am adding a screenshot so my professor can see that the duration of my movie is, indeed, 1:00, no more, no less.  I'm not sure why blogger is saying it is 1:01. 

PE3_iMovie

By the end of the iMovie tutorial videos, I learned so many amazing things I would have never figured out on my own.  Some of my favorite lessons were extracting audio from other clips, editing to the beat, and making a photo slide show to the beat of the music selected.  These are not easy tasks to master, however, and will require a great deal of practice and failure before I feel really comfortable.  I will probably have to go back to Lynda.com and watch the entire 3 hours 28 minutes of videos again at some point.  This program incorporates iMovie into many assignments, so mastering iMovie is a necessity.

With the first of my favorite lessons, extracting audio from other clips, the instructor showed us how to easily get ambient noise from one clip to use in another clip that might have something profane or distracting.  I can attest to the profanity, unfortunately, because this is proving to be a somewhat tedious and frustrating process.  Also, in my original idea for a brief movie, I was working with my cats.  These beasts are not season actors, and were not cooperating with me.  None of them hit their mark, and they didn't even know their lines.  Several times, as the camera was rolling, a certain word or words that shall not be named flew from my mouth.  So, pulling some ambient noise from another clip or project would have been a useful tool.  Unfortunately, I just did not have enough good footage to use to make my Cats! The Musical movie.  This shall be a work in progress, though, so stay tuned for that little gem.

  Here the instructor extracted some ambient sea and seagull noise from one clip to put where he originally had some loud, distracting truck noise that took away from the scene.









Another helpful tool I learned was editing to the beat.  This looked really easy, but when I tried to practice the lesson, I had little success.  I think what happened was I did not have a very beat-heavy piece of music.  I wanted to keep the music I had originally selected, so I just chalked my failure up to experience.  This is going to be a very useful tool next time I have photos that I want to make into a slideshow.  Summer IS calling, so this might be something I practice in the near future.


Now I am going to let you see what I ended up creating with my new knowledge.  I don't think it accurately portrays the amount of new knowledge I gained from the iMovie Essentials tutorials, but failure WAS an option in this case.  I think as long as I learn from my failure, then it really isn't considered failing.  At least I know what I did wrong, and how to fix the shortcomings next time I use iMovie.

Lastly, I want to present to you my certificate of completion I received for successfully completing the training.  I highly recommend this training if you want to get better at using this amazing program.  Every Mac has this program, and every Mac user can figure out the basics.  Lynda.com helps you go further than just figuring out the basics.  Lynda.com presents the training like a layer cake.  It keeps building and building until, at the end of the training, you have this monstrosity of a cake lingering in front of you.  This is a good metaphor for many reasons.  First and foremost, you could not possibly eat the entire cake in one sitting.  Yes, I watched all of the videos, but I have not even attempted to eat or digest everything.  It will take several sittings to tackle this one.

(FYI--I finished all of the videos on  June 11, but did not watch the very last video until this morning when I realized I did not put the certificate in my blog.  Thus, I am making these edits now.)

PE2_iMovie

As I went on with the iMovie Essentials Training on Lynda.com, I found out why I had problems inserting still photos into my movie trailer.  I think it was because I was trying to create a movie trailer for a movie that had yet to exist. 

In this tutorial, the trainer explains how to make a movie trailer.  He is completing this trailer for the movie he has been making throughout the training. 

I see that as he is creating his movie trailer, his tools on the right hand side are grayed out just like mine are.  This must have been my problem. 




What I ended up doing instead of creating my Cats! The Musical movie (mostly because I didn't have enough salvageable footage of my crazy cats), I decided to use the best shots I had in iPhoto to make a movie.  I opened a new project to start from scratch, and then I started perusing the plethora of cat pictures I have saved on my computer.  I quickly came to realize that I have more pictures of animals than I do of humans.  It's a good thing I have embraced the whole Cat Lady thing.

I spent quite a lot of time going through my pictures, making clips out of them, making sure the clips were the appropriate duration for the size of the picture (some pictures panned up, and they needed a longer on-screen duration than others), and putting them in some reasonable order.  I then inserted text and transitions.  Lastly, I needed some music to accompany the cats.  Sadly, I did not have the soundtrack for the eponymous Broadway musical, but I found a piece by Yann Tiersen ("Amelie" soundtrack) that is just as whimsical as my cats are.  I had to adjust the audio level of the video clip I inserted. 
Here is a screen shot of the trainer showing how this is done.

The trainer shared extremely helpful information on how to fade in/out audio (which I used int he beginning and at the end of the movie), and how to turn up/down certain background noises.  He also explained how to use the iTunes library to find background music.  I did not use the sound effects, but learning about them is bound to be beneficial in the near future.  I recently made a movie with some of my students that will undoubtedly benefit from sound effects and background/voice levels tweaked. 

Here is a screen shot of me adding audio to my project. 

PE1_iMovie

I thought I knew enough about iMovie until I started watching the Lynda.com "iMovie 11 Essentials" training videos.  I was blown away!  It was 3 hours and 28 minutes of learning new and exciting things about a program I have now been using fairly consistently for the past four months of this graduate program.  I wish I had watched this training in month 1 of this program because it would have helped immensely on the video projects we were asked to do.  Looking back at my videos, I shake my head.  I'm not saying I am an expert quite yet.  I have some new skills to try out, but iMovie 11 editing features are something that requires practice to master.  Maybe that will come with time.  My mastery of iMovie will probably come as I am graduating from the program.  Well, at least my students will be excited! 

I started doing a project that was supposed to look like a movie trailer.  I had this funny idea of making a "Cats! The Musical" movie, with "Crazy Cat Lady Productions" as the distributor.  Well, I couldn't figure out how to insert pictures into the movie. As you can see from the screen shot, all of those tools are grayed out.  I went back to some of the tutorials on Lynda.com, but I couldn't find a solution to my problem.  I still don't know why the buttons were grayed out.  I will have to do some additional research to find the reason.  Maybe one of my classmates will know, and suggest a solution?  Maybe it was the kind of template I was using?  Since this is a movie trailer, the format would not allow me to use still photos?  Hmm...

Another important lesson I learned was getting my clips just right, or the editing process.  Before watching the training video, I thought I knew what I was doing in this arena, but there was more to it than what I was doing.  There are advanced tools you can use to mark the clips as favorites, and delete the useless clips by marking them as rejected, thus deleting them.  The advanced tools make editing and organizing easy and quick.  I was happy to learn about these tools, and I got to work "favoriting" and "rejecting" many of my videos. 


The last of the most helpful clips of the training video was when the trainer, Garrick Chow, was explaining how to import from sources other than a camera or iSight.  I thought it was interesting to learn that iMovie can work with clips that are emailed to me or found on the internet.  As long as the clip is one of about four specified formats, iMovie will have no problem working with it.  I took this to mean that I could get clips from another student's Viddler site or YouTube, and include it in my movie.  I assume this would be copyright safe if I made sure to get permission from the student or source.  This new knowledge could make my perspective movie about cats a little easier because, as we all know, a person can spend hours searching cute and funny cat videos on YouTube. 

Here is an example: