By Ben Bromley and Amy Schindler

Tools like Animoto allow you to create brief videos from still images, short video clips, and music (your own or you may select from Animoto’s varied selection). The free version of Animoto allows you to create videos of about 30 seconds with video clips up to 5 seconds and about a dozen images. You may find this tool a quick way to create a teaser for an upcoming exhibit  or a way to highlight images of a person, building, event, or otherwise connected by a common theme.

Task

1. Create a video using Animoto.
2. You can share it now on Facebook or another location, or move on to Thing 18: Video Sharing to learn about YouTube and then upload it to YouTube. Whichever you do, share a link to it in your blog post for this week’s Things.

Blog Prompts

• Why did you choose the video you did to share? What were your impressions of other videos from archival repositories you found on the site?
• If your repository is already using video sharing, did visiting other repositories’ pages provide any new ideas?

Resources

• YouTube Help Center videos.
• Watch this Animoto promo video for a quick overview of how the tool works.
• Amy Schindler created this teaser in advance of an exhibit about university music groups.
• You may find Kevin Leonard’s video introduction, created for a Midwest Archives Conference web 2.0 session, amusing.
• Need help finding more examples from repositories using video sharing? Check out the list of archives sharing new and historical videos from Archives2point0.