Be Your Own Creative Genius

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

Once it was only experts could create movies, radio shows and books. Now, with some help from the web, you too can be your own movie director, broadcaster and publisher.

Sign up at www.animoto.com and they’ll whip up a movie combining your video clips, stills and text. These are small movies, mind, but are huge fun to play with.  

Possible uses? Invite friends to parties, drum up old pals for a school reunion, produce a fond tribute to Mum, or push a charity. With Valentine’s Day coming up, you could even make a marry-me movie, upload it to YouTube or embed it in a blog and provide your beloved with the link.

Don’t be scared of terms like ‘uploading’ and ‘embedding’ – Animoto makes them one-click, easy tasks.

You pick from a various backgrounds and music to go with your input. They concoct your movie in minutes and then email to tell you it’s ready to view. How much? Free, if you confine yourself to 30 seconds; it’s amazing what you can fit in! Upgrade – $US39 for a month –and there’s much more flexibility.

To see an example, here’s a YouTube link to one of mine – tinyurl.com/232fd9y

As for radio, when Auckland ‘wealth and abundance coach’ Catherine Newton wanted to spread her wings globally she decided to host her own weekly show. Now she’s on www.blogtalkradio.com, just one of thousands of internet radio stations around the world.  

Some are streaming live 24/7. Others combine listen-now functionality with podcasting. A podcast is a digital show that listeners can access via iTunes. Subscribe and you can listen at your leisure on any MP3 player, which might be an iPod – hence the ‘pod’ part of the podcast word.

You can, for instance, store up oodles of BBC and Radio New Zealand podcasts. Catherine joins that august company by creating her show for free in her home office. She interviews achievers she admires by phone, seeking out their success tips.

How’s she doing? “Six thousand subscribers in six months,” she says. “It’s great!”

As for books, self-publishing is big these days. One of the most beautiful ways to do your own thing is via www. blurb.com, set up by photographer Eileen Gittins. She wanted to print a book of her own images without spending a fortune, and figured others might be interested too.   

Blurb sends you free, professional-looking layouts in which you can insert photos and text, play with colours and fonts and create a beautiful tome. You send them your layout, they send back proofs for you to check, you sign it off, and then they turn out a lovely book.

You can buy one or a heap of them, and friends can also order them from the site. You need to add shipping costs from the US, but it’s a lovely way to print something affordable. A handsome, 200-page hardcover costs $US54.95.

A friend of mine, Don Donovan, has produced a great Italian cookbook filled with his own photos and was thrilled with the result. Not a bad way to create a special gift or an heirloom!

* This article is adapted from my regular Webmistress column in Next magazine.  
 

By Lindsey Dawson