iMovie Project: animated, narrated Slideshow with music
Create a slideshow in iMovie for a student project, presentation or unique gift idea!
With a name like iMovie, you probably don’t think of it if you are trying to come up with a way to create a nice animated slideshow with music and narration, but believe me, iMovie is not only ideally suited for the job, but it’s also really easy to use for this task.
Due to copyright restrictions, I’m using personal photos that were already in iPhoto and some GarageBand music. I originally figured out how to do this because my daughter had a school assignment to use still images from a hit TV show or movie, music from her extensive pop iTunes collection and to record her voice – in Spanish – narrating the resulting slide show. You could also use a slide show like this as a fantastic, creative and highly personal gift idea. Do an anniversary slide show for your husband or wife, or maybe your parents. Create a family documentary for an upcoming family reunion. Trust me, your family will think you had Steven Spielberg produce it for you!
Getting Images Ready
If your slideshow images aren’t already in iPhoto or if you want to bring in images from the web into iMovie, the process is pretty simple. For school presentations, pretty much everything on the web is fair game, but you should really be aware that someone owns the images that you pull off the web, so if you’re doing this for anything other than a school project, be careful of copyright infringement.
For our example, I’ll do a search for some images from NASA. As a government, tax-funded agency, their images are fair game for copyright-free images, though searching for NASA images doesn’t guarantee that they’re ONLY from NASA.
So to “steal” some pictures from the web:
Right-click or control-click on an image on the web and choose “Save Image As” from the dropdown, contextual menu. Save all your images to a folder someplace that’s easy to find. When you’ve got your assembled images, simply select them all by going into the folder where you put them and pressing command-A (for select all) or lassoing all of the images, or clicking on the first image and shift-clicking on the last image. There are many quick ways to make selections.
Then, with your folder open in one window and your iPhoto application open as well, you can just drag all the images into iPhoto and they will create an “Event.” You can name this event anything you want.
(If you’re not getting images from the web, you can import them from your camera into iPhoto. Or even from someone’s mobileme gallery.)
Getting Images into iMovie
Now, open up iMovie. Running across the middle of the iMovie application window is a horizontal bar with some icons on it. On the far right side are five icons to the right of your audio meters. Those five icons are how you look for music, photos, text, transitions and backgrounds.
Let’s start by selecting the camera icon. This lets you pull images from your iPhoto library and from PhotoBooth. (PhotoBooth is a BLAST to play with if you’ve never tried it.) Select iPhoto and Events from the pulldown menus and you should see your new photo event right at the top left corner of the bottom right hand window. Double-click the event and the images inside the event are revealed in the window.
You can now command-A to select them all and drag them into the top left window where the little dotted line storyboard boxes are. Just drop them anywhere. Or if you want, you can drag them up on at a time in the order you want. But if you drag them all up together, you can rearrange them later by just dragging them around.
So, now you have a sequence of images and you’ve dragged them into the order you want them. But any slide show needs a nice opening title. To do this, I’m going to show you two really fun, easy techniques.
Adding backgrounds and Text
Go back to your icon bar in the middle of the screen and all the way to the right. Three icons to the right of the camera icon you just used to import your photos is an icon of a globe. This is how you can import backgrounds and maps into your project. We’re going to pick a nice moving background image, but you could pick a solid color, gradient, animated map or texture. I picked the underwater background and dragged it to the spot just to the left of my first image in my project window. A little vertical green bar will appear when you’ve got it to the proper spot. This is also how you can add images in between images you already have assembled. Just drag it between the two shots where you want it to appear and when you’ve got the little green bar lit up, let it go and it will drop right in.
So now we have a blue, watery background for a few seconds before our first shot, but we really want some text on there to tell people what this slide show is about. So back we go to our little icon bar in the middle of the screen. Between our camera icon and our globe icon, is a little “T” icon. That’s where we go when we want to add text.
Some of the text is animated and some of it is still. Some is what is called “lower thirds” which are good for identifying people on the screen, and some are full-screen graphics that are good for titles. That’s what we want, and if you put your cursor (which will turn to a hand icon) over any of the text boxes, if they are animated text, then you can see a little thumbnail of how they move. “Sideways Drift” is a nice animation for the opening title of our slide show, but you can use anything you like. Drag “Sideways Drift” up and drop it right on top of our Underwater background in the Project Window. You’ll see that a little text area appears over the Underwater clip and in the Viewer in the upper right corner, you get the ability to select the placeholder text and change it to something appropriate for your slide show. Now, the cool thing is that this will animate automatically, with no intervention at all!
Another way to do this is to drag the title up first and iMovie will actually ask you which background you want it over! As with many things, there are lots of ways to do the same thing.
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this is to drag the title up first and iMovie will actually ask you which background you want it over! As with many things, there are lots of ways to do the same thing.
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i will see that a little text area appears over the Underwater clip and in the Viewer in the upper right corner, you get the ability to select the placeholder text and change it to something appropriate for your slide show
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i want it to appear and when you’ve got the little green bar lit up, let it go and it will drop right in.
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iMovie Project: animated, narrated Slideshow with music
Create a slideshow in iMovie for a student project, presentation or unique gift idea!
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