How easy it is to make a trailer using iMovie

While I was at the Brooklyn Cyclones game last night with my two daughters, I decided to whip out a trailer using iMovie to illustrate how easy it is to make one.  This trailer took me about 90 minutes to make.  I could have made it in less, but had to wait for the right shots during the course of the game.

As you can see, its fun. I especially like the "in search for the perfect hot dog" and then the immediate shot after that is of them going to the bathroom. I think that's hilarious.

For this, I had to take about 25 short videos.  Just wait for times when they're playing or doing something cute and then take a quick 5 to 10 second video of that.

I hope you enjoy the film!

My Morocco Trip - part 2 - Video using iMovie

In the iOS app, iMovie which is part of the iLife suite of products and includes iPhoto among other things, they have these template trailers that you can work with.

I've always seen them and tinkered with them but never really had the time to devote to actually making one.  Since we had a lot of bus time and on these types of trips, I usually have my nose in a book most of the time, I thought I'd use the opportunity to play with the app and see if I could make an actual film with it.  It was surprisingly easy! There are 11 trailers you can choose from.  They range from adrenaline to retro to Bollywood to expedition.  You pick one and then you can modify the text to fit whatever you want it to be. They'll give you about 30 to 40 different "slots" where you have to put video in.  These slots will range from anywhere to .4 seconds (that's four-tenths of a second) to four seconds long.  They'll give a description of the type of shot needed, like landscape, close up, group shot, etc.  You take video that fits that.  Once you finish taking the video, you'll then scroll through that video to find the right start and end point for that specific clip.  You may take a 10 second clip but only use 1.4 seconds of it, so make that 1.4 seconds count.  This taught me to make the shots we took short.  No long drawn-out 2 minute films.  Just short, point at this and look surprised, shots and then we clip the surprised part and put it into the film.

If you have people around you who's willing to cooperate with you taking film, it can be surprisingly fun to make these.  I took about 120 videos of varying lengths.  Some members of my family were happy to cooperate, others thought I was insane. The group shots with me and my wife in it were difficult to take as I needed a cooperating person to take it.  90% of the video I took was with someone yelling at me to hurry up and get on the bus or something like that. With the amount of video I took, I ended up having to delete numerous apps on my phone to create space.  I also had enough that we were able to make four different ones.

Here is the first one we made, a thriller.

This video was specifically of my wife and I and nobody else. This was our original and after seeing how it came out, we got excited and made more.  My wife decided to make her own video using some of the film we took, but she has 3 more shots to finalize so that's not up yet.

I took video of various family members and made it into a longer video called Into the Desert. This is about 90 seconds long. See below.

 

This one was a lot of fun to make and I found myself constantly looking around at our various locales for opportunities for a good shot. I also have another app called Action Movie FX which we used to make a couple of shots that we used here, like the warp drive shot in the very beginning.

Another shot I took of the Hassan 2 mosque in Casablanca hit the cutting floor, but I thought it was so good that I decided to show it to you. I took a long shot of the mosque and then put an effect that makes it look like the Starship Enterprise was there. Pretty good huh?

The last video was a film I got the inspiration to make from my wife. She suggested we make a film for my mom's recipe app, so we did. Its called "In search for Ancient Recipes" and I have to admit, I'm excited about that one. I think its a fabulous film and can't wait to show it to everybody. Hopefully it'll be up today or tomorrow.  I have one more shot to do and then it'll be finished. 

I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I enjoyed making them. If anybody wants some tips or help with making a movie via iMovie, let me know. I don't profess to be an expert but I think I'm pretty good at it so far.

My Morocco Trip - part 1

This will be the first of a series of blogs I'll write recounting my Morocco trip.  If you're not interested then feel free to skip over this.

We flew into Casablanca and stayed at the Barcelo Casablanca somewhere in the city center.  It was a nice western style hotel, but the wi-fi was virtually unusable.  Food was decent, and we did a bit of sight-seeing.  First off the bat after we dropped off our bags was we ran over to a local cemetery where we saw my grandfather's gravesite.  I've embedded a video of it here.

It took a bit of searching, but we managed to find it way off in the corner. It didn't occur to me to take video as I simply took video of the overall gravesite.  I did take a couple pictures and here they are.

This is a photo of the gravesite itself.  He passed away in January 1934, a good 40 years before I was born. Technically, he's my paternal grandfather's father.  There's a funny story that has made the rounds in my family about this specific guy. My grandfather was the youngest of 8 children. The first 5 had made it to Brooklyn. My great-grandfather decided to come over to Brooklyn to visit his first grandson and planned a 3 month stay. He ended up staying only 2 weeks before he decided to come back to Casablanca. In Casablanca he was a big shot and would sit in a cafe and do business. But in the U.S. things were very different.  One day, he was taking a trolly somewhere and was wearing a top hat and his best suit and a cane, just minding his own business. A fellow passenger leaned over and asked him if this was so and so stop. My great-grandfather looked at him like he was crazy and said "do you know who i am!?!?"  He couldn't believe people would actually treat him like an equal. The rest of the family in Morocco was hoping to come to America and thought that his early return was a good sign.  Once he got off the boat, he swore never to return again and the rest of the family had to wait till his death in 1934 before they came over.

A pic of my family around the gravesite.

It occured to me that almost 80 years before, my grandfather was actually standing where I was, burying his father.  Very surreal. There are caretakers who are paid to maintain these cemeteries.  We visited a couple others around here.

We also ate dinner at a Jewish Social club that is member's only.  However they allow international visitors to eat there. We had chinese food which we found ironic.

After a couple days in Casablanca, we headed to Fez, and stopped in Rabat on the way there to look at more jewish cemeteries and other stuff.

Will write more soon. I prefer to break this up into a series so people don't glaze over reading an extra long post. 

In the meantime, during the course of this trip, I took more than 100 short videos and spliced them together into several highly amusing films.  I'll be writing a post specifically about this so look for it soon.