I had to create a 90 second video clip about social media for a module I’m studying, here it is:
How I made the video.
Using an open source application Freeplane, I did a brainstorm of ideas for the presentation. I concluded that I would need to deliver the presentation as audio-visual to include the many ideas, although the majority of initial points were eventually omitted due to time constraints on the video.
I then completed a storyboard to help me put the seemingly disjointed ideas into a logical order. I planned each section and then viewed the media resources available to include one image per point raised. The media was useful but because I didn’t have time to listen to all the music available, I decided to select a commercially available piece to help create the atmosphere I desired. (Corner Stone Cues – Requiem for a Tower).
Due to file size constraints, in order utilise the 60-90 seconds available to me; I decided the final presentation needed to be 640 x 480 resolution (with 1500 bps) and having PAL-compatible 25 frames per second. I found Google Picasa too restrictive for this purpose and it didn’t allow me to crop and resize photos to ensure the full video was used – so I had to make use of additional software.
I used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to crop and resize the downloaded images to fit and fill the final video resolution. As the narration needed to link to each slide, I found Picasa, again, too restrictive because it didn’t allow me to specify transition times uniquely for each slide. I had made use of Windows Live Movie Maker software. This is free but proprietary software bundled with the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.
I stored the mp3 commercial music file onto my iPhone and with one earphone in, I recorded my presentation via my desktop webcam’s microphone to ensure the narration was under 90 seconds. I used the Microsoft Sound Recorder to create a WMA file, which I converted via iTunes to mp3 and then subsequently imported this into Audacity. I created multiple tracks after importing the commercial music mp3 and reduced the gain on the music by 15dB in order to hear the narration more clearly. I exported the combined resultant recording as an mp3 file and added this as a soundtrack in Windows Movie Maker.
Finally I exported the finish movie as a WMV file (under 10MB size) and uploaded this file to ShareSpace. The illustrations below show various uses of the different software: