Assignment

This assignment asks you to choose your favorite sports team, and then make a video montage of that team. As of writing, this assignment is worth 4 1/2 stars and is an easy and fun assignment, so I highly recommend it!

To get started, you will first need to pick a favorite sports team. When I completed this assignment, I chose the Washington Redskins. Once you’ve picked your team, you will need to go about looking for highlights of that team. I found all of my clips on YouTube, and used a Converter to download the clips onto my computer. If you have a Windows computer, your best bet will be to use Windows Movie Maker. Both of these programs are pretty similar, but for this tutorial, I will be walking you through iMovie.

When you first open iMovie, you will need to click on the ‘file’ tab, and then ‘import media’, where you will be faced with a screen like this:

Once you find the clips that you downloaded from YouTube, click ‘import all’, and this will add them into iMovie. From there, you will need to go about adding each clip into your movie. Each of your clips will be under the ‘my media’ tab, and you just need to choose which sections of the clips you want to use. In the example below, I wanted to use this 10 second clip in my movie, so I highlighted it, and hit ‘add the selection to movie’.

The movie clip will then be added into your movie. Repeat this process until your movie is complete. The ‘transitions’ tab will allow you to add something in between each separate clip. I usually use either ‘cross blur’ or ‘cross dissolve’, as neither are overwhelming, yet they add something interesting to the movie.

This assignment asks that you add music as well. To do that, you can either use music that is already on your computer, or use the same Converter mentioned earlier to download music from YouTube. Once the music is on your computer, you will go about the same process as before by hitting ‘add media’. This will add the song into your iMovie. You will then need to drag the audio file into your movie, and below your clips. In the example above, the music that I used is displayed by the green lines at the bottom. If your music runs too long, simply highlight the part that you want to cut out, and hit the ‘delete’ button on your keyboard. Clicking on the green lines themselves will allow you to alter the volume of the music.

Finally, I would recommend that you add a title screen to your movie. You will need to click the ‘titles’ tab in iMovie, where you will see something like this:

I usually use the standard title, which will allow you to add a few words before the start of your movie. After all of this is completed, you will need to save the movie so that you can begin the process of uploading it. On the upper right hand corner, there is a button that you will need to click that allows you to share the movie.

In the screenshot above, click ‘file’ and that will begin the process of converting and saving your movie to your desktop. Finally, you will need to upload the movie to some sort of hosting site. I have used both YouTube, and uploading it to WordPress directly. Either way, make sure you give your movie a title and short description. Depending on how long your movie is, it may take several minutes for it to upload and render. After the movie has been uploaded, make sure you embed it in your blog post, and don’t forget to explain how you went about the process of creating it.

Good luck!