Personalizing Online Videos is Fun

Website Recommendation
Now that Christmas is approaching, e-cards are abundant. One of the best sites for video e-cards is JibJab. JibJab allows you to add your face to videos in order to personalize the experience. You simply upload a picture that includes a good head shot. JibJab provides tools to clip the face from the background. The tools are easy enough for a child to use. Once the faces are available you can use them in a number of cards. You will be required to signup to the site and not all cards are free, but the signup requires simply an email address and a password and there are enough free videos for the kids to enjoy the site. We started by Elfing Ourselves. The kids loved this. We did it last year as well, but the videos are getting better as the technology improves. After we elfed ourselves, Kyle explored the site and found a High School Musical video that he could add his face to. We all laughed out loud at the results. After the kids were done, I made the following image.

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Warnings
The videos are designed to be humorous, so not all are appropriate for children. Also, the videos might not be available forever. Last year, the Elf videos stopped being available after Christmas. We can no longer view the videos we made last year. If you really like your video, you can buy it for $4.95. I prefer to emphasize the process over the product and to save the money.

The Writing
I made Kyle write about his video. I decided to have him focus on the process of making the video. We talked about different ways to approach it, either a series of simple sentences or one complex sentence. It worked better for him to write it more concisely in a complex sentence.

Del's Video Blog

Delbert now has a blog, Del Reports. He is 5 years old and cannot write sentences yet, but he can talk. I have decided to have him do a video blog, until he can write. Kyle's blog has become more video orientated, but I now require him to write about the videos.

What do you need to make web videos and post them to blogger?

• RCA EZ205 Small Wonder Digital Camcorder : This very small camera is useful and simple to use. The kids can operate it themselves and you don't have to worry about external media, like tapes or DVDs.
• Windows Movie Maker: Useful for editing a video or putting clips together.
  
• Moyea Flash Video MX (or the free version, Moyea Video4Web Convertor): Converting the video to flash allows easier viewing within the website.
  
• Space on the Internet: As of now you can not store the videos on blogger, so I put them on another server and link to them. Google and YouTube accounts are free, and allow you to upload and store flash files.

These are the steps we follow.

1. We shoot the video.
2. We plug the camera into the usb port and copy the video onto the computer.
3. We check the video to see if we want to trim it or edit something out of it.
4. If we need to edit the video, we open it in windows movie maker.
5. Once we are happy with the video, we convert it to flash with the Moyea program. The video is originally saved as an avi file, but flash is more web friendly.
   
6. The program produces an html file and a .swf file. We load the .swf file on the server.
7. We open the html file, change the location of the .swf file (since we moved it to a different location), and then we copy all of the code in the html file.
8. We Create a new post on blogger.
   
9. We paste the code we copied from the html file into the new post.
10. We write something below the code.
    
11. We publish the post.