I Make Videos, You Can Too!

Yes I do. Well, I've only made two so far, this one I'm about to post, and one I posted about a while ago.

Technically, with this video and the previous one, all I've done is animation and video editing. I haven't actually shot any footage. The main reason for that is because I haven't got a video camera (video mode on my kodak easyshare doesn't count), and I haven't got any good video editing software (Windows Movie Maker, while handy, is crap). Plus my hardware isn't exactly top notch either.

So I would love to write, direct, produce, film and edit something, and maybe I will. Probably not in the recent future, though :D

But anyway, here's the video:



Cactus Freek asked me how I made it, so here's a brief tutorial:

First off, I took photos of everything and opened them up in the Gimp, cut around them to remove the background (a LONG process, by the way), and scaled them accordingly. That's basically all the prep.

Now comes the animation. With this I worked backwards. I started with the final image of everything unpacked by moving all the items to where I wanted them to be, and saved it as a jpeg. Then I continued working backwards, moving and rotating each item bit by bit towards the envelope, saving to a different image after each move (100, 099, 098, etc).

After the main animation was done, I just reopened the first and last frames, added some text, and that was it for the all the frames of the animation. In total, there were 59 frames.

It was then time to put all the frames together in Windows Media Maker. I know there are other tools better suited to this, but it was about 9 or 10 pm by this point, and I needed to get it done before the day was over. So I imported them, threw them in the storyboard, changed the length of time each frame is displayed, added some audio, and exported the wmv. Upped it to Youtube (which took ages because I exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit so it's shaped to 128k speeds), and what appeared above was the final product.