Rolling🗒️ Planning📂 Project Folder 🎞️ Presentation Deck 📃 Script 🎙 Mic📹 (Web)Camera 🤖 Software 🎬 Filming🏭 Assembling Parts 🎙 Voice Recording 🎨 EditingThat’s a Wrap
Rolling
Hello Creator 👋
Welcome to the Movie Creator's Manual, a guide that will help you turn your presentations into movies. This journey does not have to be full of friction anymore, nor is it currently lived only by professionals. Now anyone can become a filmmaker in their own right. All the resources and tools you will need to get going as a moviemaker are just ONE CLICK AWAY 🖱️
This manual relies on the best practices of individual creators discovered and curated from all over the mighty World Wide Web. You'll learn how to:
- have more impact across your organisation by taking advantage of modern tools and practices,
- create your first movie and by doing so bring your presentations to the next level of communication,
- and inspire others to join the Next Tech Generation.
By breaking down the journey into Planning, Filming and Editing stages this guide will take you step by step through making your first movie that you can then spread all across and beyond your working area.
Let's get ready to make your presentations fit for asynchronous communication!
🗒️ Planning
Preparation is Half the Battle: in this stage you will work through a checklist of tools and resources you'll need to have at your disposal before you start producing your movie.
📂 Project Folder
Create a new folder (on your desktop or any other location) for your project <name>. From now on, this will be your container for everything you will be downloading, saving and exporting that is related to your project.
🎞️ Presentation Deck
Your presentation deck (.key, .ppt) represents the groundwork for your project. Before you start making a movie out of your presentation deck, make sure it is rich in images.
Full text slides are not pleasant to look at. Furthermore, what's typically written on the slides is narrated as a voice over your movie. Don't make your audience choose between listening and reading. We don't want to make it too hard for them. If you don't know how to visualise some of your text, you can use these free infographics!
📃 Script
Create a new notepad. If it was the case, take all the text off your presentation slides and insert it into the note file. Save it in the <project> folder. This will serve as a script for you voice over. Once you have done this, you can start adapting the text according to how the story will unfold.
🎙 Mic
The rule says that any external microphone is better than what is integrated in your laptop/computer. This rule has no exception.
The Yeti mic is a great one, take one incl. a proper "hand". The advantage of this mic is its USB compatibility. Yeti makes for a great standard mic in virtual meetings, too. And it looks cool. Click, search for it and buy it, NOW. If you want to invest properly into your equipment, you go for the mic Joe Rogan is using in his interviews. A good mic will save you a lot of time.
📹 (Web)Camera
Maybe you would like to record your face to introduce yourself, or maybe you have an idea for a scene that would visualise your idea better than an image. A good camera is essential to maintain the quality level of your movie. In case you don't have an external webcam already, this Logitech should do the trick. As in the case of the mic, you can keep using this webcam as your standard equipment in virtual meetings.
🤖 Software
Movie Maker 10 🎬 is a standard software for making videos on Windows OS. iMovie is the equivalent to Movie Maker 10 on Apple iOS.
This guide uses iMovie as example, but ☝️ - no worries - you will find a youtube tutorial for each of the steps as done using Windows Movie Maker. You may also want to download Logitech Capture for recording and streaming videos. For the curious creators: here is a plenty of other free software for making videos.
🔊 Soundproof Room
⚠️ This is the most important item on the checklist: you want to have a room that is as quiet as possible. Any source of disturbing sound (washing machine, kitchen appliances, kids…) should be identified and eliminated.
Close any windows and doors. Warn the people you are living with that you need some silence right now. Then, treat your room so there is a minimum amount of reverberation happening. If you clap your hands in the room, you will hear a reverb tale. If this reverb tale is long, you are going to have a really hard time recording a usable voice-over, because voice-overs by nature need to be extremely dry. So, if you can, bring some clothes, bring some book shelfs and hang it all around your workplace. You can also treat your room with professional sound treating materials.
🧳 Digital Assets
Envato offers a wide range of professional digital assets (music, stock videos, images...), resources and services. Here's how futur.arch uses Envato elements in its movies. The monthly subscription is definitely worth it, if you want to spice up your videos. Unsplash is a free source for high resolution photos, Freepik for any other visual artefacts.
💡 Inspiration
In this blogpost I describe my journey about why and how I approached making movies. Your imagination is perhaps the most important tool of all. Let yourself inspire anytime you watch a movie or your favourite series. Cultivate your creativity!
🎬 Filming
Now you'll move to the assembly line. Let's put a rough draft of your movie together and record a voice over your clips. This is the most creative stage of moviemaking.
🏭 Assembling Parts
- Open your Keynote (PowerPoint) Presentation and convert your slides into TIFF(JPG) Images (TIFF is the best quality format for iMovie).
- Save the slides in the <name> project folder.
- Open iMovie (Windows Movie Maker).
- Go to Projects and create a New Project.
- Give your project <name>.
- Open <name> by double clicking.
- If needed, use your equipment 📹 to record your own scenes and save the assets in the <name> file. Here is a short tutorial for Logitech users on how to record videos with Logitech Capture.
- Finalise the collection of your media (images, music, sound effects) you will want to use in your movie and save it in the <name> file. At this point, you don't have to have a clear picture about what is in and what is out, yet.
- Import all the media that you want to have in your movie into iMovie (Movie Maker). Here is a short tutorial for the Windows Movie Makers.
- Start dragging and dropping your media into the timeline of your project.
- Play with the length of each movie clip in the timeline according to how long you want to speak over it. Keep the whole movie at max. 20 minutes. Too long movies simply don't work in async communication. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. 🌀
🎙 Voice Recording
- Make sure, one more time, that your room is quiet and soundproof.
- Check the audio settings on your computer and make sure your external microphone is the primary input source for the audio. If needed, open your computer's system preferences, go to sound and click on input.
- Open your script, do a dry run of what you want to record, and press the Mic button in iMovie (Moviemaker)'s main movie window and start recording 🔴 your voice. Be aware that you can record the entire talk in little steps, sentence by sentence. You are the designer, and you determine your movie's level of perfection.
- The recording is done. The media will be automatically saved in your software's library. Click right on the recording to find it and copy (not move) it, in case you would like to edit your voice at the later stage.
🎨 Editing
This stage is all about fine-tuning and preparing for exporting.
- Introduction: As a tip, replace your introductory slide with a Hollywood-like movie intro. Don't be afraid to get it out there! This part has to raise the immediate attention of the viewer. "Oh, the movie starts, let's be quiet!" - should be the effect. The movie 'Beating the Innovator's Dilemma' uses a stock video of a "Wushu training fight" to underline the tone of the movie that's following.
- Adjust the length of each clip to the length of the voice-over. Leave at least 5 seconds break in between each major chapter.
- Once you are done editing and fine-tuning, you can export your video. Save the movie in the format of Video and Audio, select resolution (preferably high) and quality as well. But beware, the higher the quality, the bigger the size of the video.
- The exported video is ready to be uploaded wherever you want to make it accessible (Youtube, Microsoft Stream, Vimeo...).
That’s a Wrap
So, that's it. You now know all the basics that you need to start creating your own movies.
Video appeals to both sight and sound in a quick burst of stimulation, it captures the attention of the viewer immediately and makes a lasting impression (link).
Movie is a great format for asynchronous communication in a distributed world. A movie can be consumed at one's own pace, and a properly hand-crafted movie can leave a far better impression than a sequence of words you'll get to the picture presented on the screen in front of you. But that's always context dependent, of course. It's up to you to decide when to present live and when to send over a video.
Here's the movie that this manual takes as example 👇
Have a great day! 🌞