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.