iMovie club this week included a foray into the wonderful world of music video creation.  I showed an example of what you can do with just an iSight camera and then talked children through importing CDs into iTunes and downloading YouTube videos (thanks to ClickToFlash).

The technique basically was to start recording iSight video using iMovie, play the song in iTunes and then mime along to the song.  You then put the resulting video into the timeline and then add the audio of the original song as the background sound.  A double-click on the video lets you turn down the audio thus leaving just the CD audio.  If you use the precision editor you can then slide the video back and forth until the miming syncs up with the audio.  (Using a clapperboard would make this a lot easier, so maybe I’ll try that next time.)

Once the basics of the track was laid down, children could then import downloaded YouTube videos into iMovie and then select interesting clips to insert over the song.  If you enable the advance tools in the preferences, you can insert a cutaway by dragging a clip onto an existing video clip in the project.  This keeps the audio and the mimed video in sync between cutaways – it’s a pretty cool feature!

It did take quite a lot of one-to-one support from me, so hopefully next week children will feel more confident to continue creating their music videos and exploring