Slide shows
Movies in their simplest form can be slide shows of images, either photos or scanned pictures or artwork.
A more developed slide show would have a suitably fitting musical sound track. The choice of music can significantly change the ‘mood’ of the work being presented.
To add to the visual appeal of a slide show, transitions could be applied between some or all of the slides. The timing of the pause and the transition should be considered.
A voice commentary instead or as well as the musical sound track makes for an effective means of communication. The spoken parts could include contributions from a number of different children.
A fully developed slide show would include images, transitions, a musical accompaniment, voice over commentary, and titles or captions.
The application of the slide show is varied and numerous. Examples include:
- Photos from a school trip or residential.
- A gallery of artwork images that have been photographed or scanned.
- Artefacts that have been brought in to support a topic.
- Children and adults from the school community giving an idea of cultural diversity or the different roles that are played.
There are many different packages across the different platforms Windows, Mac and Linux that allow for the creation of slide shows. The technicalities of actually assembling the slide shows will not be discussed. Instead some of the features and functionality of readily available software will be stated.
Windows XP
Slide show view
If you are presenting the slide show ‘live’ to an audience, do not need to publish it as a self contained file and do not need to back the images with sound of any type, the slide show viewer in Windows XP will show the images full screen with a pause on each image.
Movie Maker
For anything more sophisticated than the live, silent slide show you can use Windows Movie Maker. This will allow titles to be added, but only if they have been prepared as image files and slotted between the pictures. A sound track, either music or speech can be added and played over the top of the images. In my experience, the syncing between the soundtrack and the images in Movie Maker is rather poor. Transitions are not possible in Movie Maker. The final slideshow can be saved for publication either as a Windows Media File or to be more compatible with other platforms exported as a .avi file.
There are many packages aimed specifically at children and education that can produce slide shows. See notes below about publishing formats.
MAC OS X
iPhoto
All Apple Macs are supplied with iPhoto which is part of the iLife package. iPhoto has many uses, one of them is to produce very polished looking slide shows with transitions and a backing track, which could be a voice over, musical accompaniment or a mixture of the two. (The audio would have to be prepared separately from the images then applied in iPhoto).
The latest version of iPhoto that ships with iLife 05 allows for the timings of individual images to be set. It also includes a feature that will automatically ‘strech’ the timings of the images to fit the length of the musical accompaniment. A useful feature as it can be tricky to get the timing of a slide show exactly right ‘by hand’. iPhoto slideshows can be presented ‘live’ just as in Windows slide show. They can be saved locally with all settings intact to be shown again at another time. The ‘Ken Burn’s effect’ allows still images to appear as moving ones as the image slowly pans and zooms for its duration on screen. The most useful feature is to be able to publish to a QuickTime file that is cross platform compatible and can be scaled to fit its purpose, be it a full screen, full resolution presentation, or a small file size that can be posted on the web or emailed.
If you have a credit card to hand, you can also order a hard copy of your slide show in the form of a hard or soft covered photo book. It only takes a few clicks and about a week’s wait for the high quality book to be printed and sent.
iMovie
Although iMovie is capable of editing DV up to broadcast quality High Definition DV, it can also be used to produce a slide show. It allows all the functionality of iPhoto as described above, as well as allowing easy application of titles, special effects, transitions and multiple sound tracks with adjustable volume. As will be discussed further in the DV section, iMovie allows any projects to be exported out to a Bluetooth compatible device, so pupils with suitable equipment such as an organiser or a blue tooth phone could take a mobile copy of their work away with them to show family and friends.
iDVD
iMovie projects such as a finished slide show can be passed to another package in the iLife suite, iDVD. This allows the user to burn the slide show to a writable DVD which can be viewed on virtually any modern domestic DVD player.
Keynote
Keynote is a presentation tool along the lines of Power Point. It will import and export PowerPoint files quite happily. When using the native features however a slide show can be brought to life with almost cinema quality text animations, transitions and slide object animations. It’s layout and tools are very similar to PowerPoint and it is just as easy to use. The final presentations look very polished and smooth. It allows export in many formats including QuickTime, Flash, and PowerPoint.
Windows XP / Mac OS X
Whether you are using Windows or Mac computers there are some common applications that allow you to publish slide shows:
PowerPoint
Most people, pupils or adults are familiar with PowerPoint. PowerPoint can be set to show a slide show with or without user intervention and with controlled timing for slides. The disadvantage of publishing in PowerPoint format is that slide shows can only be viewed by people with access to PowerPoint or the Power Point viewer. This potentially limits the audience.
QuickTime Pro
QuickTime Pro is an inexpensive upgrade to the free QuickTime Player. It allows a series of images to be played as a slide show and a sound track to be applied over the top. Generally all images to be included in the slide show would be saved into the same folder / directory and then imported into QuickTime Pro, which would automatically assemble it as a slide show.
Web Page Publication
It is fairly easy to prepare a series of html pages with a simple click link between each. Sound can also be included to play automatically on a page opening or to require a user click to trigger it. It only takes of few lines of Java Script to get the browser to load the next page in a sequence after a set time period. It may be easier of course simply to publish a self contained slide show in a web friendly format on a single page.
Publishing the slide show
It is important that the work produced has a real purpose and a real audience. Some programs have their own proprietary file format that makes it difficult to publish and share finished work.
It is useful to have the facility to publish to a cross platform compatible format such as QuickTime or .avi. Even animated gif can be used if there is no sound backing the slide show, and there are not too many slides. Windows only .exe files should generally be avoided as this will automatically limit the audience.
Using a cross platform compact format will allow you to publish your movies on your website for all to see.
Bluetooth devices capable of playing video files may be able to play exported movie files.