Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Animoto is an online service that makes it easy to create professional-looking animated videos from your photographs. The process couldn’t be simpler — you just upload a group of photographs or choose them from your account on Flickr or other supported site, choose a music clip from their the Animoto collection or upload your own, and click on Create. Animoto’s software takes it from there, analyzing your images and customizing the movement and special effects to match the music. It takes several minutes before the video is ready, but you can get pretty impressive results with very little effort. The video can be viewed online, mailed to a friend, or uploaded directly to YouTube.

This could be a fun “craft program” for kids or teens, who might enjoy making their own videos like the sample below:

Thirty second videos are free. If you want to make longer ones, you can pay $3 per video or $30 a year.

Libraries and other organizations can use this site to make simple promotional videos to post on YouTube and their own sites. Here are some examples:

• Teen Music Video — From the Leesburg Library in Florida
• Sparta School District — This one uses a custom soundtrack with words as well as music
• Read in 2008 — From the South Carolina State Library

Of course, there isn’t much skill or creativity involved in making videos this way — the software is doing all the work. It can be fun, though, and users who tire of this and want more control have lots of options for making their own movies using other programs.

Last night at the Computers in Libraries conference, the first annual InfoTubey Awards were presented, honoring outstanding library promotional videos posted on YouTube. YouTube has given libraries a new, low-cost, high-impact method of outreach, and it’s great to see Information Today, the publishers of Computers in Libraries and sponsorts of the conference, honor libraries who are using this new medium.

It was interesting watching the winning videos in a crowd of librarians, and hearing the acceptance speeches. The videos don’t look like typical professional productions made for TV. They are were all made using basic videocameras, and edited by inhouse using free or inexpensive software, and they fit the YouTube environment perfectly : quick to make and easy to share. Creativity, authenticity and sincerity count more than slick production values. Most of the winners talked about how much local attention and appreciation their YouTube videos were getting, and how much fun all of this was for both staff and patrons.
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This interesting article in the Boston Herald last Sunday talks about how many short films of music performances from the past are turning up on YouTube :
Magical portal to a musical past by Jenna Wolf

Here’s a quote from the article:

“It’s sort of a historical portal,” said professor Victor Coelho, chairman of the Musicology Department at Boston University, who is using clips in his lectures. “It’s like a cultural e-Bay. A real revolution is taking place. Now we can be transported in time.”

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