Mini Movies with Animoto

If I had enough time to make all the family music videos I wanted to, you would all hate me because I’d post a new one every single day. Lucky for us all, I will never have that much time, but I’m still super excited to have found a way to create these little multimedia nuggets quicker and easier than ever. Click through to read all about Animoto, which I tried for free (and you can too!) and will be subscribing to with my very own money ASAP.

If you’ve ever tried putting together photos and video clips into a seamless little video to share with family and friends, you know that there’s no such thing as fast and simple when your processing program is either (a) the basic stuff that came on your computer or (b) some super-complicated professional-grade system your designer friend gave you after deciding it was too complex for her. That describes the extent of my video-production history, which includes hours and hours and hours devoted to creating about twenty total minutes of viewable product.

Enter Animoto, the online source for all my quick-and-dirty, sweet-and-shiny video-editing needs. They offer a bunch of cool (no, seriously, they’re cool) frameworks into which you drop your photos and vid clips from all your favorite services: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, your smartphone, and of course your computer. You can select music from your computer’s library or pick from the Animoto library (which is full of great stuff I’ve never heard). The results look fancy and professional, and you look pretty good too because you haven’t pulled your hair out and stayed up until your eyes turn red trying to get your Ken Burns on.

The thing that took the most time was loading the photos, but even that was a breeze because I just dumped everything I wanted to use into a folder, selected it for upload into Animoto, and then wandered off in search of snacks. When I came back about a half hour later, I got to work arranging my photos, adding descriptive text, and doing a little chair-dance of glee because this was taking no time at all. Which was good because my kids were still awake and I could only hide from them for so long.

Here’s my finished video, documenting last weekend, when my parents came to town to celebrate the holidays a little early, since we won’t be seeing them for Christmas this year:

Fun, yeah?

Some cool stuff you need to know: