The Story of My Life Project

Please review the instructions carefully and ask Mrs. Feld any questions you may have. The idea is to create a fun iMovie with pictures of yourself when you were growing up (Baby Pictures and Others) and to make you think about your life, your story (to date) and the story you want to create for yourself (what strengths, talents, weaknesses and dreams do you have?). I believe that we have the potential to create our own lives with our thoughts, our dreams, our intentions, our motivations, our desires and our attitudes. Hopefully, you will always embrace a positive outlook on life and believe in your dreams (I really hope so...) It's up to you to create a wonderful life for yourself! No matter what! And self-knowledge is a person's most important asset to live a full life.

So, ideally, you should have at least 15 slides (clips) in your iMovie (including black screen with text). If you check the Rubric, you can have a better idea about what information goes on each slide. The first slide should be a Title Slide with your name on it ('The Story of My Life" and your name). You can put a picture of yourself on your Title Slide if you want or use a Photoshop Creation. You can also create collages with your pictures and use your pictures more than once. Just get creative! An easy way of creating a collage, once the pictures are scanned, is to create a collage of pictures using a PowerPoint slide, and once finished, you can use the Command-Shift-4 to select the whole slide, and a picture will be created on your desktop. The pictures in iMovie must be JPEGs; if you download a Photoshop image (extension ".psd" into iMovie) the image will be red.

If you wish to organize your thoughts using a Word document or PowerPoint before you enter the text on your movie/slideshow you can do that. Whatever is easier for you. The final movie must look very professional. Add music of your choice and convert into a QuickTime movie when completed ("full quality" this time). Trim the music and ask for help if you need it! Your classmates can help you too.

Also, please be careful with your timings; if you want all your pictures to be at least 8 seconds long, remember that you must change right away the first picture you download in the iMovie workspace, then the other pictures you drag there will also have the same time. If not, they will all be 5 seconds long (the default timing). Pay attention to the timing of your titles and text and make sure that this timing is lower that the clip's timing (or you will have problems!). I also want you to change the Ken Burns effect in some of the image clips (you decide which ones, or you can change it on every other picture). Be careful with transitions, and add them only at the very end (some should be less than one second long - others can be longer, but you must make sure your pictures stay on screen for at least 3 seconds.

Ask Mrs. Feld any questions you have and also ask her how to scan your pictures. There are two different type of scanners in the Mac Lab and they work differently. The project is due October 28th, 2010 (hopefully!).