Nexus

Thanks to this post on Darren Kuropatwa’s blog, I’ve discovered a cool new service that produces music videos. Animoto combines your images and music into a short production. It’s easy:

1. Upload your images from your hard drive or Flickr account.
2. Upload your own music or choose from their CC library.
3. The software analyzes your pictures and music and renders a movie.
4. You can then e-mail your movie to friends or get the code to post it online.
5. If you’re not happy with your movie you can do a manual edit, deleting, adding or re-arranging your pictures, and choosing new music. Or you can choose to have it automatically re-mixed. They claim you never get the same movie twice.
6. The whole process takes from five to fifteen minutes.

The licence agreement precludes using the service with younger students, (you have to be at least thirteen). I would try it though with older students.

What I like is that the emphasis is on the message and not the bells and whistles of the software. You have no control over the transitions, effects and timing. You can only choose the images, sequence and music and therefore need to concentrate on your message. If you don’t think the resulting video communicates your message, you can re-mix it until you are satisfied. I would ask students to create a video on a topic of their choice, post it to their blog and then write about its production, explaining their choice of images and music. A short video is only thirty seconds long. In that time you can’t really use more than 10-15 images, so like Twitter, you have to be concise and go for meaning and impact.

So…drumroll…

Here’s my first video, a promo for our International Space Station Project, ISS07. What do you think? Should I keep my day job, or am I ready for a career change?

Addendum:

OK, there’s a bit of a glitch. The embed code messes up the formatting of my blog page, so I’ve placed the code on its own html page . The Animoto site allows you to get the code for most other blog sites; this is a Wordpress issue I think.

Technorati tags: Animoto online service video production ISS07

Thanks to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach for her post leading me to the cartoons of Dave Walker.

I’ve been travelling for the last week and just skimming my RSS feeds. Now that I’m back home “I’m digging in” to some of the “meatier” posts I’d set aside. I’m feeling kind of like this cartoon at the moment.

Technorati tags: Nussbaum-Beach cartoons blogging edubloggers RSS Dave Walker

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.