Create a mini-movie masterpiece

Find your cinematic voice with a film you shoot and edit yourself

By Cindy Waxer

These days, you don’t need Steven Spielberg’s artistic vision or Quentin Tarantino’s wild imagination to take the director’s chair. Just ask Rob Morris of Orlando, Fla. A computer programmer by day, Morris has long relied on Windows Movie Maker to create popcorn-worthy mini-flicks which he posts on video-sharing web sites.

The launch of Morris’s film career coincided with the birth of his daughter Morgan. With family members scattered across the United States, Morris wanted to publicly chronicle Morgan’s leaps and bounds without resorting to snail mail, or worse, to frequent flier miles.

“Every week, I made a little video and posted it online for family members to look at,” says Morris. “For them, it was a way to see my daughter grow as the months passed by.”

Dubbed Morgan Movie Monday, the series not only earned a loyal following but also prompted Morris to create Windows Movie Makers.net, an online forum that has a whopping 31,400 members swapping editing tips and participating in tutorials.

So what does it take to join the ranks of today’s Oscar Award-winning wannabes? With Windows Movie Maker, the process of becoming an amateur filmmaker is simple.

Get a head start on footage

Nowadays, there’s no shortage of devices capable of capturing your most precious moments. Cell phones, digital cameras, webcams — they can all create compelling footage. But for creating truly high-quality images, digital camcorders are your best bet. Not only can you record video in a user-friendly format, but you need only connect a camcorder to a computer with a FireWire cable to easily import footage into Movie Maker.

The most sophisticated digital camcorder, however, can’t turn shoddy video into cinematic gold. John “PapaJohn” Buechler, author of Microsoft Windows Movie Maker 2: Do Amazing Things! (Microsoft Press, 2004), offers the following three tips:

• Try out a tripod for maximum stability.
• Keep objects well lit to avoid the appearance of shadows.
• Don’t be afraid to get up close and personal.

“A lot of people show you pictures of their grandkids,” Buechler says, “but what they’re really showing you is a picture of the scenery.”

Deliver punch with special effects

Artful editing of your footage is the next step to creating a top-notch mini-movie. Windows Movie Maker offers a huge selection of transitions to place between video clips including the fade (a cross-dissolve between two scenes) and the wipe (a major change in location).

But Jake Ludington, author of Easy Digital Home Movies (Que Publishing, 2004), advises: “If you’re making a video for the web, the fewer transitions you use, the easier it is to compress the video so that the file size is small enough.”

Other special editing effects include

• increasing or decreasing picture brightness, gray scale and sepia tone
• rotating
• slowing down or speeding up a movie’s pace

But in your haste to pack visual punch, be careful not to overlook the importance of audio. “Audio is at least half the experience of watching a movie,” says Buechler, who used a digital camcorder to record more than 100 sample songs built into his granddaughter’s Yamaha synthesizer.

Taking a page from the pros

You may be a cinematic novice, but your first foray into filmmaking can still look professional. Choose from a selection of Movie Maker fonts to generate titles and credits. Or better yet, visit 1001 Free Fonts to download and install hundreds of new fonts in your Windows fonts directory.

For auditory flair, convert your favourite music CDs into MP3s using Windows Media Player 11 for a Grammy-worthy score. Or leave your flick to fate by clicking AutoMovie, a Movie Maker feature that analyzes your selected video, pictures and music. AutoMovie combines these elements to automatically create a movie based on the editing style you choose.

Treating your audience

Instead of overloading a friend’s e-mail inbox or taking the time to burn a movie to a DVD, today’s amateur filmmakers are turning to video-sharing web sites such as Windows Live Spaces, YouTube, Revver and Viddler to share their masterpieces. You can also store and share large files, including videos, using Windows Live SkyDrive.

“[Because of] the higher quality of movies today, broadband is becoming more and more the way to go,” says Buechler. Simply save your masterpiece to your hard drive and, after following the instructions for uploading to one of the services mentioned above, post your movie online where cinematic fame awaits.