Animoto Book Trailers

I worked on a project with the 7th graders a couple weeks ago. We used Garage Band and Animoto to create book trailers for the novels they chose for an independent reading assignment.

They searched for photos in Flickr Creative Commons, used music from Royalty Free Music and Free Play Music, used Power Point to create Works Cited slides and saved them as JPEGs. I did let them find their book and author images from a Google images search, figuring if they're not public domain, they should be! I'm not sure that's an argument that would actually hold up in court, of course....

There is an issue with Animoto cutting off the end narration and the final (Works Cites) slides, but I'm trying to figure out a work around for that. I think if you allow the soundtrack an extra 15 seconds or so of music beyond the narration, that will force Animoto to use those final slides. That's my theory, anyway!
Here's a sample of the result.