// Aporia News 2.5

Recently we had a challenge on youtube which asked for players to put together video responses to see what people thought our upcoming game was going to be about. Those who submitted videos did an amazing job, but not all of them had been familiar with video creation and the ease of video creation until it was explained to them. Currently the majority of internet users have Windows based PCs and many of those don’t realize they have a really good and free program on their computer for making movies: Windows Movie Maker. I’m not personally familiar with Macs, but I do know quite a few mac users and each of them are very familiar with the features offered by their macs - so for now we’ll just focus on WMM.

So let’s go over a few things to show you how simple it is to create a decent video.

Here’s a video I created while writing this blog and the steps to creation will follow it:

First I wanted to figure out what I wanted the video to be, I had a decent idea of a theme but I wanted to browse for some basic images, video clips, and songs from various sites that provide royalty free content.

I want to show you that you don’t even need a video camera to make videos, so I’ll focus on songs and pictures before I insert any video into it. (all of the content in the video are available on the internet)

The song I used was available through Open Source Audio at Archive.org. It’s a little whimsicle diddy from a group called bugeye, archive.org lists their website as bugeye.info, but their website no longer exists (shame too I like the song).

Here’s a link to the song

So I’ve got a folder open with my stuff that I’m going to put into the video and I open Windows Movie Maker. I simply drag the song over onto the movie’s work area (the white space next to the playback frame) and then I drag it down to the rows at the bottom. With the song in place I can see now that I’m looking at about 4 minutes and 10 seconds worth of songtime.

This is going to be a tutorial kind of video, so I’m going to open with just some text. I’ll go to the top toolbar and select Tools > Titles and Credits. It’ll give you a list of options, I chose title at the beginning since it’ll be at the beginning and then I typed in what I wanted it to say. You can leave it as it is now, or I recommend messing with the following options: Change Title Animation and Change the text and font color (I did) and find something you’re comfortable with.

You can change the length of time the title (or any picture or video) is displayed during the video by clicking on one of the sides of the video and stretching it or shrinking it. You can, also drag a clip on top of another which will give you a fade effect.

Note: Be forewarned that WMM likes to crash, so save frequently.

Inserting video and pictures is the same as inserting music, just drag and drop.

If you right click on an image or video or even the title boxes, you can add special effects. In my video I’ve shown the addition of a fade-in and a fade-out, along with an old age filter on one of the images. Just play around with them to find something you like.

Now for video transitions you can drag a picture or a video ontop of another, this will let the first clip fade out as the second is coming into view.

For more video tutorials : click here:

And now are you ready to step up to the challenge and make your response?