After many hours of tedious work, I finished my first attempt at creating an iMovie. It is far from perfect, but I learned a lot about the program in the process so that hopefully next time I go to create an iMovie everything will be quicker and easier. I chose the topic of the Gulf Oil Spill because I knew there would be a lot of video footage on this topic and it is something with which students should be familiar. In addition, its a nice way to tie into the science curriculum of the ocean environment, which is part of Virginia's SOL 5.6.
I collected media - both photos and videos - using Google images and Youtube. I then converted several of the Youtube video clips to mov. files using Zamzar. If you are not familiar with this site yet, I highly recommend it! From there, I used iMovie to import my videos and pick and choose the clips I wanted to use. iMovie makes this process relatively simple. Where it starts to get tedious is when you get to adding transitions between clips or adding text on certain clips. There are tons of options which can make it difficult for someone who is often indecisive like myself.
As always, Apple has several helpful sites for iMovie support and troubleshooting including this iMovie tutorials page on everything from adding voiceover to your movie to cropping and rotating the video. I also found this great blog, Unlocking iMovie, full of information and helpful hints for creating videos.
A word of caution: iMovie files take up a LOT of memory, so be sure to allow enough time for saving the file (mine took about 20 minutes to save) and have a large enough flash drive if you are not able to save the computer.
Check out my final product on Youtube
