Digital Story

This week I created a film using iMovie using digital images from Google. The video shows a list of animals using the entire alphabet, one animal per letter. I first saved each image onto my jump drive, then photoshopped the image to the correct size and clarity. After that I added them to iMovie and added effects and sound. Sounds simple, right?

iMovie is not hard to use, but I've never made a movie before so I had to figure it all out. Acquiring the images is the easy part. Google is a life saver because not only was I able to search images for each animal, but also for the letters like U, Y, Q, and N, which are hard to think of animals with names that start with those letters, I could search "animals that start with (letter)" and it gave me a whole list! I put the pictures into the movie after I resized each one. iMovie gives several themes you can choose from, but you don't have to use one. I chose the "film" them because I was creating a film and wanted it to seem like the film reel of pictures that had been taken from a safari. I added text to each animal that was easy to read and told the letter and animal name.

The hardest part was finding music that enhanced my story. I didn't want to use slow music because I wanted to create the feel of the safari and how fun and exciting it was. However, I also did not want to use music illegally. When making this movie I had the Lion King's "Circle of Life" song playing in my head. I knew that I couldn't use the entire song because of copyright laws, but I could use 30 seconds or less. So I downloaded the song from YouTube and cut it to the length I wanted. I put the beginning of the song at the beginning of my film. It sets the fun tone of the movie and would be great to show to kids because the Lion King is always a childhood favorite. After I cut that song, I used iTunes free music clips for the rest of the movie. The clip I chose was only 30 seconds long so I reused it several times to last the entire film. At the end of the film I added children clapping for fun and because I hope that's what children would do after watching this.

There are so many things that can be done with iMovie and shared on the Internet. I would definitely use this in my class to introduce a new topic or tell about a future field trip or simply for their entertainment. It wasn't very hard once I figured out the basics, and there are probably so many other things I could have done with this movie like adding a video or doing a voice-over. It was fun to make a movie out of digital images and I feel proud of my work.