Making movies

Over the last couple of weeks I have undertaken a real learning journey. Technology enables us to communicate in more ways than ever before, in fact the choice is endless. New technologies and capability are continually evolving, so it is important to be aware of what is available and be very clear about what it is you want to achieve.

I have been wanting to develop some movies to promote the capability and capacity of a range of tools. I wanted to do this in a way where I could include the key information as text, provide an audio explanation and have some music playing in the background. Sounds simple ..... I know.... but the reality was somewhat different.

The first step of this journey was a posting by Richard Byrne 5 Ways Students Can Create Audio Slideshows. In this posting Richard highlighted - Narrable, UTellStory and three other applications. I explored Narrable first, but quickly realised that I couldn't have both the soundtrack and the audio. UTellStory is a quirky application to use and enabled me to create the exact type of presentation that I wanted. It was very user friendly and you could easily adjust the audio recording slide by slide, however, it was not easy to share with a large group of people. It can be embedded in a blog, but the organization that I was preparing the video footage for did not want this, they just wanted to share a link.

In the end, after lots of investigation, the solution was very simple. Create the presentation in Keynote, add the sound track and audio using the 'Inspector' tool, then export to Quicktime. When adding the soundtrack and audio, you need to upload the sound track first and then add the audio. Video clips can be shared easily via Dropbox. With larger videos it pays to save them as small or medium sized movies, otherwise you will exceed the capacity of your dropbox.

So hope my many hours of learning and investigation provide a short cut for you.