Week 12: “Lights, Camera, Action!”

This week’s tutorial task involved making a movie and posting it on YouTube. Although this skill is not directly related to the course, the ability to place movies on the internet will benefit me for future subjects at university and also for personal and business-related purposes. Movies can be used as a medium for putting forward a message or expressing creativity.

There are two steps in this process:

1. Making a motion picture
2. Establishing a YouTube account and uploading the movie

Step 1: Making a Movie
Windows Movie Maker will be used to generate a movie of a minimum 30seconds in length. It can be downloaded from; http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
(however I struggled with this website and resorted to http://www.download.com/!)

1. Open the program ‘ windows movie maker’, then choose ‘import pictures’ from the menu down the side. Then you can drag and drop the pictures into the storyboard below. If you do not have photoshop files available, you can import the files that windows provides as stock. There is a little tag ‘show timeline’ above the storyboard that lets you choose between a storyboard, and a timeline. Click on it and see the difference.


2. If you want to add music or a recorded voice over, choose ‘import music’. To include it in the program, it needs to be in ‘timeline’ view. Then you can drag drop and trim to suit. Again if you don’t have your own audio files, windows has a couple of stock songs.


3. Use your creativity to make a program by adding text and effects, then it is time to export.


4. To export, choose ‘save to computer’


5. When saved, it is ready to send to youtube.

My movie is based on images which I created for another arts course; Writing for the Web. I had developed a website based on a character that collects Polaroid photographs of his phobias and fears in an attempt to overcome them. The website itself is quite dark, and that’s the reason behind the mysterious and scary nature of the images in my movie (so no, I am not a psychopath who can regularly be found with these types of photos!).

I am still stunned at the many variations of effects which can be added to the movie… Oh my gosh!! There’s everything from sepia and vintage-film scratches to using the colour hues to transform the image entirely. And the best bit: you can combine multiple effects YAY! Maintaining the spooky theme of the images, I stuck with the basic “Fade in, from black” and “Fade out, from black”. The effect involving colour hues is my favourite by far, but with all my images being in black & white it had no effect. Unfortunately I didn’t have any music files available, otherwise I could have imported some suspenseful tunes to really enhance my work.

Now onto step 2…


Step 2: Uploading the completed movie to YouTube
This was a pretty simple step. Once I created an account I just followed the prompts and uploaded my movie. …NOT!

Guess what? YouTube doesn’t like the file extension “.MSWMM”. Doh!

UPDATE: I solved it!!

I had difficulties figuring out how to change the file type but it all came good in the end =)
On the left menu, click "Save to my computer" and follow the prompts
[ don't i feel silly! ]

Anyways, here's the final product. Neat-O, yes?