Since I was working from home, I didn’t have the pleasure of using Adobe Premiere to edit my audio and video, so I used two different programmes. I used Audacity to create my sound piece to go over the video and Windows Live Movie Maker to create the actual video.
Using Windows Live Movie Maker was very simple, and it allowed me to put everything together quite fast. I imported my images one by one, and decided which order to put them in. When the images had been place together, I played the video to see which transitions to use to really put the video together. I ended up using the ‘Blur through Black’ transition because it was best suited to the theme of the video. It was soft and not even that noticeable, which is a good thing because I didn’t want my images to be covered for an amount of time just because of a transition. I used this same one for all the images. After that I decided to use the ‘pan’ option, this allowed the images to moved up and down, left or right across the screen but in slow movements, as if I had a camera and were filming the images from different angles, this added a lot of movement to my video, which I liked. I thought it was best to add this because images played for about 10 seconds each and I didn’t want the viewer to get bored whilst looking at the picture in one place for a certain amount of time, so by moving the image around slowly it adds something different. I had some moving upwards, downwards, diagonally, and both left and right, using different motions really increased the performance of the video. This was all that was needed for video, however I needed to add the sound.
I wanted to use Audacity because I had used it previously for my Soundscape project, and it really worked for me. I liked how simple and easy it was to use and of course, got the job done.
I wanted my sound piece to have a background layer of music and then have sounds over it. Since my images, had quite a soft aspect to it, I wanted to use a slow track for the background, and my first thought was to use, ‘Kissing You’ by Des’ree. It has a really slow melodic tune and I thought it would be great to use along with the images because it didn’t overpower it. Using something fast would have put someone off of watching the video, as it would be too overbearing and would take away from the actual images itself.
I opted use an instrumental of the song, because the singing itself would also be too overpowering. I got the instrumental from youtube and used the youtube to mp3 site, http://www.video2mp3.net to convert the video into a mp3 file. Then I uploaded it to Audacity and used it as my base. I used sounds which connected with my images, and for some of the images I had, trees, and flowers, so I made sure to find, sounds of nature, like sounds from a garden or from the forest. I also had images which included, text from a newspaper and picture of a woman in an military outfit, so I found a video which had a collection a news reports, and I used a sound clip of a war siren for the military image. I also used a sound clip of African drums for the image that I created which had African textiles.
I put these in order of how the images were arranged in the video and looked back to see where the images started and stopped throughout the sequence, so that I could put the sounds in the right place. As soon as I had put them together I worked on the volume levels, and the fade in and fade out options. I had to make the sounds a little bit louder than the backing track in order for people to hear the actual sounds, and I used the fade in and fade out options so that the sounds didn’t seem so separated. Once I was done, I exported the audio file to my computer and imported it to Windows Live Movie Maker, where I placed it over the video. There I made sure to fade it in and out, at the beginning and the end of the video.
Once done, I then saved the video to my computer and also converted it from a WMA to a AVI file using a programme named, Hamstersoft.
Here are some of the sounds that I used;
African Drums – http://www.filestube.com/b1239d473971a8bf03e9,g/Sound-Effects-African-Drums-Native-Chanting.html
News Report – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t20eBRZl8Zw
Forest at Night – http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/soundfx/ambience/forestnight2wav.shtml
Garden – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9v7HdHZ5Hc
explorationsproject 