We got the students together this evening to discuss the video project. The students are in three groups and each group must create a 5-minute video on a topic of their choosing but should be related to an activity that they have seen or worked on during this field trip. Water resources or climate change or both should figure prominently in the project. Each group has been given an HD Flip video camera.
As a start, we told them to treat this project as one would a paper but without all the words. Here are some more guidelines:
1) Formulate an idea, a direction, or theme that you want to go with the video.
2) Just as you would for a research paper, draft an outline. What pieces do you need for your video? Do you need interviews? Do you need imagery of certain sites? Do you need particular sounds recorded? Do you need to do more research?
3) On the trip capture video and images with your project in mind. Talk to the other groups to see if they might have material you can use for your video project.
4) Piece your video together to see what you’re missing. Add still images. If you don’t have a shot of what you wish to highlight, search for an image in Flickr Creative Commons or some other open access, share-alike source.
5) Make a script then do a voice over. Practice it a few times to get the timing down.
6) Add a title clip and also add a clip with your names, dates and places.
Then I walked them through the use of Windows Movie Maker. Though they are using Flip video cameras and could use the Flip software, Movie Maker is a better solution for creating videos. It’s free with the Windows operation system and quite easy to use. And none of the students (or professors) are using Macs which would mean they would use iMovie software.
To get started, open Movie Maker and save your project with a new name. Save often!
Import video by navigating to your video clips. Then load those clips from your Collections to your movie project. Drag your clips into the Video timeline. You can also copy the clips from the Videos folder from you’re My Documents folder directly into Movie Maker’s timeline. You can make your clip shorter and reduce the unwanted parts of a clip by using the slider at the end or beginning of a clip (this will be a red double arrow).
Importing pictures is a way to utilize images of topics that you did not get good video footage of. The default length of time for an imported image is about 5 seconds; you can modify that to be whatever length you wish. Keep in mind that pictures will not have any sound so you will need to have some sort of audio over those images.
With both video clips and pictures, you can fade from one into another by slightly overlapping two clips or photos. This makes a smooth transition.
Remember to save.
There is a narration tool built into Movie Maker. A small microphone shows up in your tool bar. Click that and you’re ready to record. Once your recording is done, stop, save and your recording is found in your audio line of your project. You can also bring in other sounds that you’ve captured by importing or dragging clips into the audio timeline.
Create a descriptive title using the title wizard. Create a second title with the names of your group, date(s), and location. You can add text over your video clip or photograph clip by adding text over the selected clip. For text, you should use a sans serf font like Arial or Trebuchet and not a serif font like Times Roman or Georgia.
Once you feel your five-minute video is as exactly how you want it, go to Save to My Computer. Use the defaults and your video will be rendered in a few minutes. You will then have a .wmv file to send to your professors.