Do It Yourself with Animoto
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Do what yourself?
Create professional video for your business advertising needs!
Animoto is a subscription site that has hundreds of templates for use in communicating through video.
Follow along while I create a 60 second video for a leadership class outing.
As a first step, decide, "What kind of video do you want to create? Slideshow Video or Marketing Video?"
I chose Marketing.
Choose from a pre-built storyboard. Animoto has the storyboard templates in categories. The broad categories are "Popular", "Attract an audience", "Share a product or service", and "Tell your company's story." I chose the last one.
Under "Tell your company's story" there are 10 more subcategories: School Newsletter, Behind the Scenes, About Us, Product Story, Milestone Celebration, Non-profit Campaign, Social Fundraising Ad, Business Story, Company Overview, Agent Testimonial.
I chose School Newsletter. Watch the sample storyboard:
The School Newsletter is a 20 second storyboard with three photos, two videos, text, royalty-free music, and no voiceover.
Opening photo with text
Video with text
Split screen photo with text
Photo with text
Text
Video with text
Closing text
It's pretty good, isn't it?!
My goal is to create a 60 second video about a field trip day for my chamber of commerce leadership class. We visited four businesses in our town. The video will be shown in class on a large TV.
Let's start modifying. I'll work my way down the menu on the left side column.
Media
I upload 13 photos and 4 videos. That is too many photos for a 60 second video about 4 businesses, but it is easier to play with my options with every good picture already uploaded.
Ratio
I can easily make a 1:1 Facebook video, and I may do that later. But since the video will be shown in class on a large TV, I will choose 16:9.
Design
Here I can change the text box color and background color and font. The chamber of commerce has set colors for their marketing. I'm not doing this to market for them, but since it is a chamber activity, I will change the colors to their colors. Easy!
Filters
Black & white, cool, warm, denim, fade, darken. I don't use any of these filters.
Music
Animoto has over 2000 royalty-free songs for you to choose from. I will do this at the end.
Add a Block
It is easy to add a new block for my content: photo, text, video, collage, or logo.
It takes me about 1 hour to play around and get my video the way I want it. The music that Animoto automatically put in place is fine, so I keep it.
Here is my final video! Questions? Ask me!