Aug
18
Animoto – a new way to create slideshows
August 18, 2007 | | 11 Comments
Grab your latest pictures everybody and have fun with Animoto. This slidesharing site, created by film and music people, allows users to upload or link to photos and produce a free, 30 second video from these images. You provide the photos; the site stitches them together using quick cuts and fades; you can upload a soundtrack or select music from a limited library (I like contemporary jazz, but that genre was not an option). The result is a pulsing video trailer of images. Now, you can choose to remix your finished product or allow the site to do a remix.
I wanted to experiment with this new site by plucking 15 random images from my summer. My video does not seem to make sense (at least to me), but I must say the process took only minutes to produce this visual piece.
Since Edublogs does not allow scripts to run on its site, I am providing a link to my creation.
This link is to the site-inspired remix.
My thanks to Rachel, Ewan, and Paul for going first and sharing their creation.
Note: After this initial post, I learned about a method to embed this video. My thanks to Lynne Crowe for helping me figure out a way.
The Original
The ReMix
Comments
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)11 Comments so far
Thanks for sharing your video Tony. I can see some great uses for this in classrooms particularly with poetry and visual language.
Shame we can’t embed the videos directly into edublogs!
Lynne
Tony,
I leave town for a few days and come back to find you’ve discovered more new toys! This looks like fun. Can’t wait to try it out. I’ll send you a link when I get something created.
Thanks for sharing!
Cindy
You’re right, Cindy. This is fun. Perhaps students can use this site to produce a trailer for a longer digital story they put together using other tools. Ah…the possibilities.
Tony
Tony,
I like the idea of creating a trailer for the ditigal stories…or for other class projects for that matter. Thanks for keeping my wheels turning!
Cindy
What can I say? Great minds think alike.
I just discovered your blog through the Edublogs main page.
I, too, just found Animoto. I think it’s pretty neat. They are planning on making more improvements.
There’s also a similar service called Fliptrack that, right now at least, I think is even better than Animoto (my opinion might change, though, if and when they make their improvements). I just blogged about it:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/08/19/create-a-music-video/
I left a comment here earlier, but I wasn’t asked to write in an anti-spam word, so wasn’t sure if my comment got lost in cyberspace.
I learned about your blog through the home page of Edublogs.
I,too, am impressed with Animoto, especially if they make the changes they’ve told me they are going to make in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, there’s another similar web application which, at this point, is even more student-friendly. It’s called Fliptrack:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/08/19/create-a-music-video/
Well done Tony, cool slideshow.
You could try to reorganise the slideshow differently if it doesn’t make sense for you, otherwise go for an automatic remix and see what you get!
Always great to find cool new tools huh!
Rachel
Larry,
Thanks for the visiting my blog.
Sorry for the delay in posting your comments. I have my blog set for comment moderation. I used to get an email notification, but did not receive one for your comments. Time to check my settings.
Fliptrak seems pretty cool. I am going to give it a whirl and see what I can produce. As Rachel mentioned earlier, it is always great to find cool new tools.
Thanks!
Hi Tony
I’ve just received the comment above above from you (addressed to Larry!) – not sure what’s happening. Anyway just to update you, you can now embed Animoto videos in edublogs – from the code paste the url into the F button. Check it out on my blog.
Cheers
Lynne,
Thanks for your help. I now have a valuable skill to add to my tool box and share with others.