Tag Archives: movie editing

Use a Movie Trailer to Share Science

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Hollywood uses movie trailers to announce a new film and to attract viewers. You can use the same approach to tell others about an upcoming journal article, report, book, or research project. Students might use a trailer to share their experiences on a field trip or to make a video to accompany a conference poster. It’s a fun way to share your work with others or to tell people about your activities.

How does one go about creating a movie trailer? In iMovie (both the desktop and mobile versions), you are given the option of making a movie from scratch or using a movie trailer template. If you select the latter, the trailer editor does most of the work for you—for example, making suggestions about what types of footage and text to use. The trailer option may be helpful if you are having difficulty getting started with a video project. You may be at a loss as to how to organize your material to tell a story…..or you may not have time to plan, shoot, and edit a movie from scratch.

To help you out, I’ve created a two-part tutorial to show how to use the trailer option in iMovie (Version 10.0.8) to create a movie trailer. In this tutorial, I recreate a trailer that announces an upcoming, hypothetical paper, but you can use it for many other purposes. The tutorial walks you through the workspace and shows how to: import footage and other media, modify added video clips and photos, and convert the trailer to a movie project to allow more extensive editing.

Even if you do not plan to use a movie trailer to share your work, making a mock trailer is a great way to begin learning how to design and edit a video. And, who knows? You may end up with something great. If you already have film clips or photos of your research or other activity, the movie trailer editor will allow you to make a video in less than an hour. If you do not like the provided templates (and some are pretty cheesy), it’s possible to convert the trailer to a regular movie project that can then be edited to your liking.

Parts One and Two are embedded below (select full-screen and HD for best viewing). Direct links to the videos are here and here.

How to Make a Video without Film Footage: Montage Revisited

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montage_thumbnailA commenter recently took me to task for using a blog post title that was misleading. The post, which was one of my first on this blog (August 2012!!), described a film editing technique called “montage” in which the filmmaker uses a series of still images instead of footage to tell a story in a video. The title of the post was “How to Make a Science Video Without Film Footage”. The commenter said that I failed to tell how to do it, what software to use, or to provide a tutorial. Therefore, my post was “wrongly named”.

My intent with that post was to encourage budding scientist videographers, who have no video footage but do have lots of photographs depicting their research, to go ahead and make a video with whatever media they have in hand. I described how someone in this situation could still create an effective video with a sequence of photos and included a video example that primarily used still images to produce a narrative. I also described how one might use the “Ken Burns” effect to add motion to photographs and also sound effects (birds or crickets chirping, water sounds), all of which add to the illusion of movement in the montage.

My plan was to do a follow-up post and tutorial to demonstrate how to implement the montage technique….but I never got around to it.

The comment, though, told me that people were searching for tutorials showing how to make a video without film footage. So in this post, I would like to offer a tutorial that shows step by step how to edit still images to create a video. As you will see, I provide instructions on how to import photos, how to add a “Ken Burns effect”, how to add transitions between photos, how to add text titles, and how to add music or sound effects to bring the montage to life. Although I used iMovie (Version 10.0.8) for this tutorial, the principles of the montage technique generally apply to other editing software.

Note: This tutorial assumes that the viewer is familiar with the basic editing tools in the iMovie application (or some other editing software). However, you don’t need a lot of editing experience to apply this technique. In fact, montage is perhaps the easiest technique for a novice videographer to use when first starting to make videos.

Be sure to select the HD version (1080p) and full screen for best viewing (direct link to the video on YouTube):

iMovie for iOS Tutorial Updated

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I recently traveled to France and England and used my iPhone 5s and the iMovie app to create a series of videos about the places I visited. I wanted to test the ease with which I could shoot and edit videos with my iPhone, and this trip provided that opportunity. The iMovie for iOS app has been improved and includes a variety of useful tools and options, many of which are easier to use than in previous versions. The ability to edit footage quickly with this app and produce a quality movie meant that I did not need to wait until I got back to the hotel and to my computer to edit. In most cases, I was able to edit the video on the fly as I was shooting the footage. I often had the video completely edited and ready to share by the time we finished touring for the day–much to the amazement of my traveling companions. By the end of the trip, I had created ten short videos that documented what we saw and did each day. I would never have accomplished this with a camera and desktop editing software, as that would have required me to sacrifice my evenings to download the files and then painstakingly review and edit the footage on my computer.

In any case, this experience showed me that with a little practice, it is incredibly easy and efficient to create a quality video with an iPhone and the iMovie app. As I pointed out in a previous post, it’s like having a film studio in your pocket. If you were doing field research, attending a conference, or just traveling as I was, this shoot and edit approach would be a sure-fire way to ensure a finished video product—as opposed to a bunch of random footage stored on a memory card.

Previous tutorials that I’ve created to show how to shoot and edit a science video on mobile devices used an earlier version of the iMovie app. I finally got around to redoing the tutorial with the current version (2.1.1) of iMovie for iOS–the version I used on this recent trip. This new tutorial uses footage I shot at the Natural History Museum in London and covers the basics of how to use iMovie to edit a video on an iPhone (direct link to video):

Video-Making Workshop at SE Climate Science Center

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IMG_1714Last week, I taught a video-making workshop on the North Carolina State University campus hosted by the Southeast Climate Science Center (US Dept. of Interior). The workshop was held in the James B. Hunt, Jr. Library (photo at left) a fantastic facility for a video workshop as you’ll see in a moment. I was invited to teach the workshop by Jerry McMahon, Director of SE CSC, and logistics were arranged by Aranzazu Lascurain, Program Coordinator for SE CSC.

The 1.5 day workshop was a combination of lecture, discussion, and hands-on exercises. The goal was to demystify the video-making process and teach the basics of planning, shooting, editing, and publishing a video. There were about twenty participants (students, faculty, and staff) who each came with an idea for a video that they would develop during the workshop. I provided some background and basic information about each phase of the video-making process, and then participants would practice using their individual video projects. Participants used mobile devices (phones, tablets) to film and edit, and the library provided iPads and iPad minis for those without them. We also periodically watched examples of science videos and discussed the pros and cons of each.

The first day of the workshop was held in the “Creativity Studio”—a high-tech “white-box” IMG_1719space for teaching, learning, and collaboration and features high-definition projectors and movable/writable walls. At left is a photo of workshop participants during the video planning exercise.

After lunch, we covered filming, and participants set off in pairs to shoot footage. The idea was to take turns filming and being filmed on camera. One group took advantage of the library location and interviewed people about how scientists could be better communicators.

IMG_1704On the second day of the workshop, we moved to the Teaching and Visualization Lab, a “black-box” space that offers 270-degree immersive projection on three walls for a total of 80 linear feet of display surface (see photo at right). We covered movie editing and publishing and reviewed some of the participants’ video projects.

I was impressed with the variety of ideas and approaches that the participants employed in their video projects. It was an intense teaching and learning experience for me, but I was pleased with how well everything went. There were a few technical glitches, but we managed in spite of them. And everyone seemed to have fun and to enjoy the video-making process.

How to Make a Book Trailer: Part Four

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We are talking about how to create a media trailer for a book, which is designed to attract potential readers. In the previous posts, I described my own experience creating a trailer for my recent book, The Scientist Videographer. I explained that you need to study other book trailers (step one), identify the central message you wish to convey and elements from your book to include in the trailer (step two), and visualize and acquire the media to use in your trailer (step three).

In this post, I describe the fourth and final step, which is to compile your material and produce the trailer with a movie-editing application. You may be thinking at this point that movie editing is too technically challenging. To create my book trailer, I used the desktop version of iMovie and built the trailer from scratch. However, I will show you a really easy way to create a book trailer using iMovie for mobile devices. This application has an option for creating movie trailers, but it can be modified to make a book trailer. iMovie has templates and instructions that make it super easy to combine your video, still images, and text to produce a professional-looking trailer. iMovie does most of the work; all you have to do is drop your media into placeholders and then render the video. I used my iPad for the demonstration, but you can use an iPhone to shoot and edit your book trailer.

As you will see, I walk you through the iMovie 2013 app (for iOS) and show you how to create a book trailer. (be sure to select the HD version and full-screen for best viewing):

As you saw, the iMovie app is easy to navigate, and the movie-trailer templates provide a structure to guide you. You should be able to find one to fit your book type. If you don’t like any of the trailer templates, you can still use the basic movie editor in iMovie 2013 to create a book trailer from scratch, as I did. In fact, with this app, you can create several trailers for your book, each emphasizing a different aspect of the book or targeting different readerships. If you are working on a series of books, it would be easy to produce multiple trailers to advertise each one. There are a lot of possibilities once you learn the basics of movie editing.

If you want to learn more about planning, shooting, editing, and sharing videos to promote your work, check out my book, The Scientist Videographer (it’s not just for scientists).