Just a little story about serendipitous connections on Twitter around another daily create. I wrote about this the other day  and this is the story told for cogdogblog​ and his stories of open sharing

Behind the scenes

Hmmm… Don’t ask.

It was going to be my first black background video. It was not to be. I learnt that making video with back background that do not make one look like a ghost is just plain difficult. I then tried Touchcast on the iPad. Well, I should know better. I am sure the app is cool once you learn to use it but

image

So I decided the ‘easy’ way would be to create it in Animoto.

I have made one other video sucessfully on Animoto, but have tried several that #bigfail. It is not a transparent platform it has many rules that are there to encourage you to upgrade and you often get stuck after you have gone to far into your project to ditch it. I refuse to collude with dishonest commercial behaviour so I ditch the project rather than be forced to pay. I have an education account, you would think they would behave transparently, they do not. 

This time i worked out all their rules. Clip length, audio length, number of songs (1), free theme, total length of video allowed, maximum size, size of photos…. and I am not kidding!

The damn editor still cut my soundtrack by 2 seconds. I could not get around the problem in their editor. I think it has something to do with the addition of their logo at the end but i was not going to be forced into another way of paying to test that out. I rendered the video with faulty sound track and downloaded it. 

I then brought it into iMovie and edited it. Detach soundtrack, add new on, shift a few clips to make it flow, add titles and a little music. Bob is your uncle, as we say in the UK. Done.

What is annoying is that it has a lot of potential. Animoto that is. If only they gave clear free options and then offered upgrades. They even try to force you to upgrade for better quality video download. If I wanted that I would have asked for that when I signed up! 

Come back One True Media! That was a fast and easy way to produce video, and I did not mind paying them. They still went to the island of dead tools…go figure.