In the Fall 2010 semester, I held an iMovie workshop for two of Jim Lennertz’s classes. Both classes- FYS 098 (Political Humor) and GOVT101.03 (Introduction to US Politics) were assigned a similar project where they needed to create a series of ad campaigns.
For each project, students worked within teams of 3-5 members. Each group was assigned a candidate, and was required to produce three, 30-second TV ads. All ads were required to be burned to a DVD, and were later reviewed and discussed in class.
During the workshop, I provided an overview of the following topics:
- Equipment available from circulation
- Storage- how to save files to Nemo or an external HDD
- How to save a project within iMovie
- Navigating the iMovie interface
- How to import video, stills
- Adding voiceovers, transitions, titles, special effects
- Exporting a project to iDVD
Jim did experience some technical issues while trying to play the DVDs in his classroom (Kirby 003)- he mentioned that the aspect ratio of the projector was set incorrectly and it resulted in the image being “cut off” on the sides. He also mentioned that the DVD player in the classroom didn’t recognize some of the DVDs, but that they would play on the computer (I investigated this issue later, and discovered that in this example, the students didn’t burn their disc using iDVD- instead, they simply burned a series of .mov files to a disk). If working with this class in the future, I would stress the importance of burning the disc using iDVD to ensure it is properly encoded; ideally, this workshop should be 1.5 hours long to cover both iMovie and iDVD.
