Relaxing Slideshows with Landscape Photography and Music
*** Louis Armstrong - Wonderful World ***
*** Simon and Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence ***
How to make a Movie Slideshow with a backing track
Making a movie slideshow for sites like YouTube is quite easy and can be done with free movie making software which runs on Linux or Windows. Windows XP comes with a program called Windows Movie Maker which is a pretty neat tool for stitching a together a series of movie clips and/or still images which you lay down along side a backing track of music and/or or vocals. You choose the playing time (in seconds) for each clip and if you want to get fancy you can apply transition effects like fade in and fade out between the clips like those commonly seen on commercially produced television dramas and documentaries. Basically that is all you have to do to make an interesting short film that could relax, entertain or make people stop and think. After all we are visual and emotional creatures and we respond to visual triggers and the emotional pull of sound and music
Making it more interesting
You could leave it there and be done with it or you can think about what it is you are trying to communicate. After first putting a movie together there is always room for improvement and you have plenty of scope for being creative and crafting a nice piece of work that you wouldbe happy to let the world see. Timing is everything iewed the result and was soft of pleased with it. My reaction was 'yes not bad' but not exactly up to Martin Scorsese levels. But then Martin Scorsese was an individual with a talent for expressing his fears and fascinations through the media of moving stories and doing it in a unique way. If you let it be for for a few days, think about it sometimes and then get back to the movie a few days later your result could ten times better and look a lot more polished. The lesson here is that it takes time to craft something audio/visual which will have a genuine effect on people
Ok so how come? you ask. I googled somethiing like 'movie making tips' and within 5 minutes I had the answer - it is all in the timing and the secret is to use simple fades and not try to be smart. Apparently this is what all the professionals in the movie and televison industries do and after thinking about this for a few seconds it made sense. I should have known because I am the type of person who thinks that simple ideas are usually the best but for some reason I missed what was glaringly obvious.
Free Movie Making Software
Windows Movie Maker for movie slideshows. Good user interface (UI) which is easy to figure out
Windows Photo Story for still image slideshows. Simple and easy to use. Very nice
Linux users can try PiTiVi or the rapidly improving OpenShot video editor