Making Movies with Windows XP

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
Making movies can be a lot of fun--if you know the basic tools, techniques, and terminology involved. This first lesson provides the foundation you'll need to get started. You'll discover how to open, use, and close Windows Movie Maker, the moviemaking program that comes free with every copy of Windows XP. You'll also get some raw footage to use as we begin working together to create a movie.

Lesson 2
If you've ever used your own video camera to shoot video, you've probably ended up with some good stuff on tape and some stuff that wasn't so good. An example of not-so-good stuff would be the 15 minutes of footage of the ground rushing by that you got when you accidentally left the camera running while it dangled from your neck. One of the first steps in creating a movie is separating the good footage you want to show from the bad footage, which you want to discard. You'll discover how to do this today.

Lesson 3
Though you might never have noticed, virtually every movie and TV show you've ever watched was a story told through a series of short video clips, and each clip was only a few seconds long. Your movie will be no different. Today, you'll discover how to arrange the footage you've chosen to show in your movie into a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. You'll learn to make your movie as interesting to your viewers as movies they pay to see in theaters!

Lesson 4
Whenever you save a movie, you're faced with all kinds of choices about video quality. This type of quality has nothing to do with whether the movie is good or bad. Rather, it has to do with technical things like bit rate, dimensions, aspect ratio, frames-per-second, and other terms you may never have heard before. But fear not! You'll discover in this lesson that these things are not difficult to understand. And once you know what the choices are, you'll find it easy to choose exactly the quality you need to meet your specific purpose.

Lesson 5
One of the best things about making your own movies is that you can add your own special effects. Windows Movie Maker comes with dozens of them that you can freely use however you like. When your friends see your special effects, they'll be astonished. They'll figure you must be some sort of computer genius! But just between you and me, special effects are really easy to use. Today, you'll find out just how easy!

Lesson 6
Sometimes you need text to appear on the screen during your movie. For example, a title at the beginning of it is a great way to tell viewers what they're about to watch. And what movie would be complete without rolling credits at the end? There may even be times when you need to put some text right in the middle of a movie. As you'll discover in this lesson, all of these things are easy to do, thanks to Movie Maker's Titles and Credits feature.

Lesson 7
Do you have some great photos you'd like to share along with your movie? If so, you can pull them right into your movie and present them like a slideshow. Ever wished you could take just one little piece of video and make it into a still photograph? Well, wish no more because Movie Maker makes this easy too! Today you'll find out just how amazingly simple it is to put photos into movies, and to create photos from video.

Lesson 8
If you walked into a laboratory and took video of people peering into microscopes, what would you have? Boring video of people peering into microscopes. But what would you have if you added a little dramatic background music? A smash-hit forensics show like CSI! Background music sets the mood of a movie or scene. As you'll discover in this lesson, adding background music to your own movies is a breeze in Windows Movie Maker!

Lesson 9
Did you know that virtually every movie and TV show is loaded with sound effects? Everything from the canned laughter you hear in sitcoms, to the slaps, punches, and whooshes you hear in action movies is a sound effect that was added after the footage was shot. You can add sound effects to your movies too. You don't even need to create them because, as you'll learn in this lesson, most of the sound effects that the big production companies use are readily available for free download form the Internet.

Lesson 10
If background music and sound effects aren't enough to fill out your movie, you can always add your own voice. If you like, you can narrate your entire movie from beginning to end. Or, you can just sneak in an occasional comment or joke. Whatever works for the movie you're creating. Movie Maker makes creating narration easy by enabling you to watch your movie as you speak. You'll see how this works today.

Lesson 11
After all your hard work creating a movie, you'll surely want to show it to other people. Windows Movie Maker offers three ways to share your cinematic productions: E-mail, the World Wide Web, and CDs. In this lesson, you'll discover the advantages and disadvantages of each method. After today, you'll always know how to present your masterpieces in the best possible light.

Lesson 12
Even though CDs and DVDs look exactly alike, there's a world of difference between them. Neither Windows XP nor Movie Maker have the ability to copy files to DVDs. But, that doesn't mean you can't do it. As you'll discover in our final lesson, if your computer has a DVD burner and some DVD authoring software, you can create custom DVDs from the movies you make. Doing this will allow anyone with a DVD player and TV to watch your movie, no computer required!