Friday, August 17, 2007

Animoto: Not your run-of-the-mill slideshow

Ewan McIntosh posted about Animoto this morning, so I decided to play around (I'm in major packing avoidance..). This is about as cool as it gets. I can't stop watching this thing! Upload photos from your desktop, Flickr, MySpace page, etc. Add music (I found mine on PodSafe Audio, a Creative Commons site), then Animoto generates a music-video quality slideshow. Wouldn't this be fantastic for students? Photographers and musicians could get together to create their own music videos.
Other Uses:

  • Back-to-school night events--have the show on a loop, featuring pictures of kids-in-action, with student-composed music.
  • Advertise student musical productions before the event, especially in districts with morning video announcements!
  • Students choose photos to illustrate poems they've written (or better yet, take their own!), use Audacity or GarageBand to narrate the poems and add music. Upload it all to Animoto: semi-instant poetry reading!
  • New library books (I need to check copyright issues on this), collect pictures of the covers from new books, put it together with some music, or your own narration (see above), and show it on morning announcements. Great project for your library volunteers!

Shows up to 30 seconds are free, or you can buy unlimited video length for $3/video or $30 per year.
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4 comments:

  1. Lesley EdwardsAugust 17, 2007 at 11:46 AM

    You beat me to it! Great little program isn't it. My mind wanders to curric. again as I envision students creating one to match the theme, plot, character or mood from a novel or piece of personal writing. Or using it to make a statement about an issue. It could be very powerful with no words, just the music and pictures.

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  2. jeri hurdAugust 17, 2007 at 11:58 AM

    Yep. I'm just wowed by this.

    History classes could create historically based mini-dramas. Photo essays.

    Actually, it just occurred to me, they could add their own sound/narration with Audacity or GarageBand--though they couldn't sync it directly to particular pictures--maybe just narrate a general piece to cover all the pics. Add music in another track to underscore, save to MP3 file and upload it.

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  3. Larry FerlazzoAugust 20, 2007 at 10:58 PM

    I like Animoto, especially with some changes they're planning to make next month.

    One that I think is even more student-friendly is a similar application called Fliptrack:

    http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/08/19/create-a-music-video/

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  4. LucindaDecember 16, 2008 at 5:49 PM

    I posted an animoto-created video on youtube - I used their allegedly copyright-free music. And then was promptly notified by youtube that the music is in fact copyrighted and so they are going to plaster ads on my video.

    Great idea, but I didn't pay $90 for a business account to have someone else advertise on my work. I am really unhappy.

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