Wednesday 6 April 2011

a PhotoStory trick - the one image movie

I was at Liverpool J.M.U. last Friday delivering a media enhanced learning workshop (see http://www.melsig.com/). Whilst demonstrating using audio in PhotoStory I was asked if it is possible to incorporate multiple panning & zooming motion on a single image (e.g. it pans left to right and then back again before zooming right in on a portion of the image). I explained that you can only use one motion with each image ………… but was that correct?


This is an example of a one photo (©AJC) movie (i.e. using multiple motion) which I subsequently made with PhotoStory. There is music, but it only adds a bit of atmosphere.

OK - rather than explain it all in my words I'll give the link to a Microsoft page that has already documented the process (but I did figure it out myself - honest!)


There are lots of possibilities with this technique - that's up to you now!

Monday 14 February 2011

How to change the order of your blog posts

this screenshot shows how it's done - click inside the image to show it full size.

Thursday 25 November 2010

3 ways to embed an mp3 into your Blogger post


To embed MP3 songs in your Blog or website, you can enter the following Google Video Player wrapper code into the Edit Html view of the Edit Post window when making your new post.
You will need to replace MP3_FILE_URL with the actual web address of the MP3 file (either your own webspace or a file sharing host). If you insert the code correctly you will see a player in your blog which will magically play your audio. Click on the player above for an example.

HERE IS ANOTHER OPTION (using SoundCloud) If you upload your mp3 to http://soundcloud.com/you can paste the embed code (which is generated for you) directly into your blog post. Note that SoundCloud also offers a facility for adding comments to the audio file.
STC-Love74-sample by alancarr

FINALLY, if all of this is too daunting, drop your audio file into MovieMaker or PhotoStory (along with at least one image) and create a wmv file - keep the size small - and upload the 'video' through the Blogger 'Add Video' tool. Maybe that's cheating - but it works!
See below for a PhotoStory 'video' of Emerald Park with 'A Higher Loss' - a track from their album 'For Tomorrow'. (photos (c)AJC - that's me!)

Monday 22 November 2010

issuu - a free on-line publishing resource

Have a look at http://issuu.com if you are interested in converting a pdf file into an online publication (it's FREE!). To test it out I saved a Blogger tutorial to pdf from Powerpoint and asked issuu to turn it into an online book. The whole process was ridiculously easy - here's the result!
(Click on a book page to view in full screen)


Friday 19 November 2010

Embedding YouTube video in Blogger


this is a YouTube video - embedded into the blog as a demo (just copy and paste the embed code from YouTube into the HTML view of the 'New Post' page)