STAGE 1: SETTING UP A BASIC ANIMOTO ACCOUNT
Once you’ve played around with the free “Basic” account and you decide to sign up for a Basic account, it’s a relatively simple process. The rest of this write-up assumes that you have signed up for a basic account.
STAGE 2: CREATING YOUR ANIMOTO VIDEO
The interface is very user-friendly and they make things very simple for you. To create a new video, simply click “create video” on the top left corner. You’ll then be presented with this screen:
The directions on the right are self explanatory. You see that you can make a full-length video which basically means anything longer than 30 seconds. If you want to showcase anything more than 12-15 images, then a full-length video is the way to go. We did a short one, and that is what we sharing with you.
STAGE 3: GETTING YOUR IMAGES INTO ANIMOTO
After selecting a create video, you will be asked where your images are located. You can either upload these from your own computer or select from the animoto stock photos.
STAGE 4: SELECTING YOUR SOURCE
But as you can see, it’s just as easy to upload photos from your Flickr, Facebook, and Photobucket accounts, never mind if you not on these platforms.After your photos have been downloaded from the gallery you’ve selected, you can add more photos from other galleries.
STEP 5: ARRANGING YOUR PHOTOS
Once all the photos are downloaded into your window, your next task is to then re-arrange them in the order that you’d like them to be played in the video. Then click and drag your photos to where you want them to go. It’s also simple to delete or rotate photos with the menu below. I would recommend a really nice feature below “Spotlight” which assigns more attention to a particular photo. As you can see on the right panel, the info box shows you how many photos being used in this video as well as the estimated length of the video. One other nice thing you can do is to add your own text which you can place anywhere in the sequence. It just shows up as another little square box that you can drag around as if it were one of the photos.
Now click ‘continue’ and the next step is to select your music.
STEP 6: SELECTING YOUR MUSIC
You’ll be asked to select music from ANIMOTO music library, or from your own computer. Notice, especially when used for corporate purposes, you will obviously only be able to use music that you have the rights to use. As you can see below the genre of music you that you can choose from – the ones that aren’t visible in the picture are: Latin, Jazz, Classical, Country, and Romantic, Top 40 /Pop, Electronic, singer and Songwriter, Religious, Latin, Indie rock and Rodeo Houston. You can browse through their whole collection of music and preview the tracks as well as get more information about the track and the artist.
STEP 7: PRODUCING YOUR VIDEO
After you click on Create Video, the next step is to simply wait, which is the exciting part of your journey to your video production it may take few minutes. Once the video is complete, you can watch it through. It may be perfect, or you may want to make changes that you want, such as re-arranging the order of photos, adding or deleting photos, changing the spotlighted photos, the music, the text, or your info details. In any case, you will get an email from Animoto to notify you that it’s ready.