For this assignment, it helps to begin with an overarching story in mind.  I chose to do this assignment in a way that it would contribute to the story I’m telling in my Final Project for ds106 – Spongebob’s Best Day Ever.

So, I went digging through my kids’ toys for inspiration.    What kind of inanimate thing can I bring to life with a bunch of pictures? What kind of story could I tell?

Somehow, I found inspiration in the Queen Rubber Duckie in my daughter’s room, and the McDonald’s Happy Meal Spongebob toys in my son’s room – the happy dancer and the karate master.  I won’t try to explain how those things inspired me.  This is not a tutorial for finding inspiration.  It’s a tutorial for making this assignment.  I don’t have time nor space to try to teach inspiration (it’s a monster I don’t even really understand myself, anyway).  So sorry.  Moving on now.

So, I grabbed the rubber duckie queen, the Spongebob toys, and my daughter’s mermaid/ocean beach towel and laid them out on a card table.  I quickly noticed, in positioning my iPhone to take pictures, that I could create the appearance of different scenes, or camera angles, based on the positioning of my phone.

I learned simultaneously that this meant that for each scene, I would have to keep the camera rather still.  My husband came over to help me reposition the toys for each camera shot so that I could move the camera less between shots.  I purposefully included some shots showing the hands involved in the process to add to the corniness, and the obviousness that we’re propelling this inanimate thing ourselves.  I’m going for cheesy here.

So, I took several successive shots for each progressive scene.  I kept the pictures in order of what I wanted.  This made it super easy when it came time to upload.  I went into Windows Movie Maker, and clicked the gigantic box that says ‘Click here to browse for photos and videos.’

You can also click and drag photos into this window, but this was the easiest method for what I was trying to accomplish.  I went into the location of my photos (after importing them to my laptop from my phone using an iPhone cord), and used shift to select all of the photos for the project.  They uploaded in perfect order for the project.

In a few places, I wanted to copy photos to duplicate an action, such as Spongebob chopping the Queen Rubber Duckie, or the up and down positions of his bouncey victory dance.  For these, I right-clicked on the appropriate frame and selected copy, then left-clicked in the spot I wanted the copied photo and right clicked again and selected paste.

Then I clicked on the Edit tab under Video Tools.  Once there, I used Ctrl + Shift to select each of the frames that I wanted to change and went up to the Duration window.  I edited the majority of the scenes to 0.50 seconds.  I allowed for longer for the dramatic scene of the initial encounter with the Queen, as well as the transition to karate master Spongebob and the final dancing Spongebob scene to help draw out the fade-out.

Next, I went into the Visual Effects tab under Video Tools.  I selected the single frame where Karate Master Spongebob appears, and selected the Fade in from White feature for it.  You know.  To help make it extra dramatic.

I also went to the final scene and selected the Spin 360 degrees Visual Effect to help make a definitive end to the scene.

I then recorded a few clips of some songs on YouTube using the Voice Memo Recorder on my phone.  I emailed those to myself (because iTunes wouldn’t work right for me at the moment) and then uploaded them into Audacity and trimmed them down to the selections I wanted and for the correct lengths.  Then, I uploaded them into the Movie Maker project in order by selecting Add Music under the Home tab in Video Tools, and selecting ‘Add Music from PC’.  It matched just fine when done this way, since the appropriate editing of the audio was done in Audacity.

I saved my work in a number of ways.  I saved the project using the floppy disk button on the top left of the screen.  Once all of the editing was completed, I clicked Save Movie, and For Computer.

Once finished, I uploaded the completed video to YouTube for easy posting, and Voila!  Spongebob’s Epic Battle via Inanimate Motion is completed!