Creating Propaganda Videos Using the Ipod's Animoto App

If you have read any of my previous articles on Apple's apps for education, you probably know of a variety of apps that I have been using in my art classroom with the assistance of Mr. Junkins' Ipod knowledge. For this project, we used an extension of digital photo editing of pictures that were done on the apps of Fluid FX and Comic Touch Lite, if you would like to read my Yahoo Contribution Network article on that project, click here.

If you would like to see some of my student's digital photo editing samples, check them out on my Posterous site, here:

After the students had finished editing and saving their photos on their Ipods, the next step was for them to open up the Animoto app on Apple's app store. I had personal use with Animoto videos on their web site in the past. If you yourself haven't made one, it is a lot of fun and extremely simple. If you read my previous article, I mentioned how I used to do my entire Propaganda unit utilizing Microsoft's free Photostory program. When I first used Animoto's website, I initially didn't like how the program did nearly everything for the students, as all they had to do was plug in photos and pick music. But now I have used the app and can compare the two, I am willing to sacrifice a bit of student creativity for the sake of making my job easier and seeing how much more excited a student was for their Animoto video as opposed to Photostory 3.

Both tools essentially did the same exact thing: Arrange your photos into a playable movie with transitions and titles. But you are going to lose some features with the app that you wouldn't if you had the site. A free registered user to the Animoto web site (which means your videos can not exceed thirty seconds in length) also allows this person to shuffle their photos, cause a few of the images to appear in the spot light and you can also add titles within the movie. The app will just allow you to arrange your photos, add music and then add a name to the movie. So, in order for the students to add titles to their images for the Animoto, we had to make sure that the students edited the photos in Comic Touch Lite. For example, my seventh graders had to pretend they were living in the 1940's and it was their job to design Propaganda advertisements that may have been around during World War II.

Another difficultly we had with this program was initially telling the students to skip the step for online registration for their Ipods. Our school district has some major issues with students having email accounts, because Lord only knows who can contact them and/or vice versa. If the students had their own accounts, they could have shared their videos a lot easier, but we were limited by the issues with our school server and blocking access to such features.

We really started to notice the issues of the completed films when Mr. Junkins and I tried to pull the data off of the Ipods and onto a computer or a site so that we could share what the students created. We noticed that our students really got into the app, especially picking the music and they were quite excited to see how easily they could create a video with such transitions. When they were finished, they had the option to Share and/or Download their finished work.

If an Animoto app user hits the "Share" button, three icons will pop up instantly for Facebook, Twitter or Gmail (including tons of other options to other sites). At the time, I did recommend the students to email a link of their film to their own email account so that they could check out their work from home (but several of them didn't complete these other steps, as we were learning ourselves). If the students had access to Facebook in our school, they would also see that it posts a video thumbnail to their FB wall, which when clicked on, will teleport them to the Animoto website for viewing.

But what took us a lot of trial and error to figure out was the entire "Download" and "Save" options. We had thought that once a student just clicked on Download, we could access it later, but apparently this had issues between getting the footage off of the Ipods. Instead, it turns out that you must first hit "Download" for local viewing and off of their site, and then once that is done, the student must click on "Save" in order for the video to appear in the Film Roll on the Ipod's saved Images directory. Once this is accomplished, the MP4 files were snagged from our Apple laptop that was running Iphoto and we stored a variety of film clips so that they could be displayed elsewhere.

So that is it in a nutshell for right now. Hands down, I would have to say that Animoto app is far much easier than the old fashioned way of making Propaganda movies on Photostory. This project could be done in collaboration with the Animoto website, so that students can further enhance their movies, but make sure that you get all of the registration issues taken care of from the beginning. You may also want to contact a technology director at your school, who may purchase one FULL account for the school so that you can make even longer movies and have access to other features. Also, be sure to think of just HOW you plan to share the work that your students created. I have found the easiest way to post work (especially a handful of videos) is through Posterous.

If you would like to see some of the Animoto Propaganda videos that my students made, please click on my Posterous site here:

References:

Mr. Junkins' Posterous site

App store -

Animoto app

Photostory

Animoto's website

Mr. G's Posterous site