Infotech Seniors May 30th, 2018

Oh yay! A media unit!!!!  This is a chance for you all to take your creative ideas and turn them into a piece of art. I will offer you some ideas to try, and the tools for you to create your masterpiece.  You will work with an ipad or your phones to film the footage and then you will use i-movie or an in-browser editor to edit your work. And some of the in-browser video have templates. We will start here with the easy stuff and I will add a different lesson and different tools for you to try.  

So, if you may have noticed that videos are on a roll at the minute. They are the new and best way to promote, teach or explain something within a short time frame. With more and more videos being produced it makes sense that tools are coming out that enable the humble online traveller to be able to create their own simple but powerful videos. Quick simple animation videos that give a quick tutorial on how to to do something, or teach people about a service, or demonstrate learning are really easy for people to understand and they can simplify complex details. Plus they look good and are fun to watch.
I’ve tried out 3 *free online video makers that are simple enough for you to use yourself and keep the quality decent.  Please post a link to your video on your Weebly - use a button and label the button.

Biteable –

It really is. Biteable has made making a video super simple. They have a massive amount of templates to choose from and they’re grouped really well to help you keep your video consistent, graphics-wise. It’s free to use to create a video but you’ll have a watermark over it. I created a short video in just 20 minutes.

Look at my video created on Biteable called: How to create a video on Biteable

Raw Shorts –

Raw shorts also focuses on animation type videos. It has templates, like Biteable, that you can go in and edit each scene in the video. You can easily add, move, duplicate and delete as you’d imagine.

You can get into a lot more detail with the animations in Raw Shorts which is nice potentially but if you get a bit stuck then it’s super easy to get very stuck. The majority of the dashboard and edit tools are easy to use, but when you start getting into the animation details I tend to get put off with all the detail. I like simple.....really simple. It's also a little too business oriented....but see what you can create.

Shakr  

Shakr is very good. It creates videos a little differently to Biteable but it’s still simple to use and you do get a high-quality finish. They have video templates specifically for all sorts of uses such as social media posts, product launches and infographic style videos. When you pick a template, it tells you exactly what you need to add to complete the video. For example, for a specific template, you may need to add 4 videos and 6 images to make up the whole video. This does mean that you need to create some of the content yourself unless you are happy with what is provided.
Things I didn’t like was that some of the functions weren’t as user-friendly as they could be. For example, it doesn’t seem to let you jump from scene to scene when editing, so no re-arranging the order of the video.





Assignment criteria:  I want you to look at all three and decide on the two that you would like to make a video with.  Bonus if you try all three.  Decide what you want to make a video of.  These types of templates are great for quick tutorials:  Teaching a how to, demonstrating some kind of learning. Post them on your Weebly and we will take a look at them on Friday's class.