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So, you want to create a digital story?
Digital narratives are a great way to tell personal stories, portray factual
information, and express what's important to you through concise and engaging
video pieces.
The creation process boils down to 3 basic steps:
The first step is to write your script, (actually the first step is having experiences
in your life, but hopefully you've already done that part.
I would also recommend creating a storyboard to start planning which images or
video clips you want to show while you tell each part of your story.
The 2nd step is to gather your materials. This involves recording your voiceover, and
I would encourage you to try to use an external microphone in a quiet room, not
your laptop's internal mic.
Audio quality makes a big difference to the impact of your piece. (ahem) I mean,
audio quality makes a big difference to the impact of your piece.
This step also includes gathering your images or video clips. You can search the
Creative Commons for copyright-free images, videos, music, and sound effects.
Remember! When you save each file, copy the author's username into the
filename so you can attribute them in the credits. This will save you a lot of time
versus looking them up again later.
Check out digitalstory.osu.edu/resources for some great websites to search.
The final step, where this video will focus, is bringing your materials together in
video editing software and timing the lengths of your photos to match your voiceover.
I'll show you the basics in iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.
We'll start with iMovie. I'm going to show you the basics of constructing your
story and cover some common pitfalls so you can avoid them.
Ok, now this is really important:
Before you start importing your media into any editing software, make sure that
your files are organized and named the way you want them. Having a folder for
your project with all your files neatly named and organized not only saves you the
headaches of searching for things, but it is essential to keep things in the same
place with the same name after you import them, because if you move or rename
the file, iMovie will still be looking for it in the original location, and you'll get errors.
If you're using iMovie from iLife '08 through iLife '11 with version 9, I'm going to
recommend doing the free upgrade to Mavericks operating system because
iMovie version 10 is a lot easier to use.
With that in mind, I'm going to show you the previous version of iMovie because
it's a bit less intuitive:
When you first open iMovie, you want to start with a blank new project, no theme.
Next, you can begin to drag and drop your images into the timeline where you
see the drop zones.
They'll come in at 4 seconds each by default, but that's pretty quick to show
anything while you talk about it, and you'll probably want them longer than that.
You can double click an image to bring up the inspector. From here, you can
increase the duration. To save yourself some time, you can apply this change to
all stills in the timeline. This will also affect new stills you bring in.
This is a great time saver because it's easier to trim clips shorter than it is to
manually increase their duration. HOWEVER, you must turn this checkbox OFF
BEFORE you can trim clips by selecting parts of them and hitting the delete
key.
When you've brought in all your images, you're ready to bring in your
voiceover. When you drag your audio file over, place it on your first image, and
look for the green plus sign. This creates an audio track that you can move
around and split in the timeline. If you drag your audio file over the background
and it changes color, it cannot be moved or edited as easily, this is meant for
background music that goes over the entire piece, but I don't recommend this
method.
If you do this by accident, you can always press command Z or go to Edit, Undo.
You can add your voiceover and music tracks over a clip the same way, and then
move them, trim them, and split them at point where the playhead rests by going
to Clip, Split Clip, or using the keyboard shortcut Shift, Command, S.
You can use this to create DRAMATIC... PAUSES
So, I'm hitting the spacebar on my keyboard to pause and play and then
selecting and deleting parts of the images to get the timing right.
You can also add transitions by dragging them between clips like so,
and you can add titles before, between, or on top of clips.
Remember to add your credits at the end to give credit to your image and music
sources.
iMovie autosaves, so there's no need to save unless you want to transfer your
entire project onto an external drive which you usually have to do by copying the
iMovie Events and iMovie Projects folders.
When you're done, you go to 'share' and 'export using Quicktime' to create your
video file.
That's all there is to it!
Windows Movie Maker has a similar workflow in which you drag your images and
voiceover into this collections pane and then into your timeline
Remember not to move, delete, or rename them after you import them or Movie
Maker will get CONFUSED!
Also, with Movie Maker you only get one track of audio. If you want to have
music simultaneously with your voiceover, you have to combine them in an
external audio editor like audacity, or after you finish editing your story with your
voiceover, you can export it, then re-import your video, add the music, and export again.
You can add your credits by going to Edit Movie, Make titles or credits in the
tasks and "add credits at the end"
When you're done, click 'Done, add title to movie.
To export your video, under 'Finish Movie' click save to my computer, name your
file, and click next.
And there you have it!
If you've used Creative Commons images and music, you can upload your video
to YouTube or another hosting service, send it to your friends, family, or
colleagues, and everyone will just love it.
For more information on making videos and assigning video projects in the
classroom, click here! and here!
thanks for watching!