Windows Movie Maker

It's holidays here in NSW and holidays means a little extra time to investigate things further. So, inspired by Dianne Krausse's clip Que savez-vous, and compelled by the fact that I needed to come up with some trivia questions and challenges for our Year 7 Languages Day, I sat down to create some simple photo story / movies using Windows Movie Maker. Now, for the seasoned campaigners out there, some of the following may be old news or no news, but lets hope there is some good news in here. Regardless, having found the time to play around in movie maker, I discovered a couple of useful things to share:

Video Effects - In the Edit Movie menu of movie maker is the "View video effects" button. Clicking this provides you with the opportunity to change your photo or video clip in different ways - subtle and not so subtle. If you are using a clip that is not of the best quality, use the "Film age, Old" effect; I found that as it is designed to make it look older, it covers up the fact that the clip is old or pixelated - not perfect, but it helped.

Splitting Clips - The ability to split clips into two or more parts and to take snap shots of movie frames enables you to have some fun with your video clips and edit them. Change the order of events in a clip, place photos or text in between parts of a video clip or simply edit out certain parts of the clip. My first ever attempt at a screencast is at the link here to help you with this - I did try to embed it, but it was huuuge (took over the whole blog). I used jing to create the screencast.

And here is the resultant movie. The finished product: