Pictures

Pictures in Movie Maker are graphics that don't move. They can be photographs, drawings, maps, or clip art. The first step for learning Movie Maker is to bring pictures into your project.

Before you start taking graphics from the internet, you must consider copyright laws. This is a HUGE issue that is beyond the scope of this curriculum web. Generally speaking, you can use most pictures you find on the internet for a project you are making for classroom use, as long as you don't take a large percent of one person's material and don't make any money off of it. Most of all, WHEN IN DOUBT, GET PERMISSION! For more information, see The Copyright Website. The 'Info' link has the actual laws, including fair use laws. More copyright websites are listed on the Resources page.

Before you can import pictures into your project, they must be either on the hard drive of your computer or in your folder on the server. If you already have some, you can use them. Otherwise you can either find your own on the internet (see the Resources page for some good sites) or, to save time, click HERE to access some that I have collected for you. You will need at least four pictures, and at least one video.

As you start this project, you can either switch back and forth between this page and Movie Maker, as described before, or you can tile the two programs horizontally, so you can see them both at once. To do this, make sure both programs are maximized and that all other programs you have open are minimized. Next, right-click in an empty area on the taskbar and click 'Tile Windows Horizontally. Now you should be able to see both this page and your Movie Maker project at the same time.

Now that you have graphics ready, look at Movie Maker. There is a column on the left side called 'Movie Tasks.' There, under 'Capture Video', click 'Import Pictures.' Navigate to the folder in which you saved your graphics, and select all of the pictures.Click 'Import' to bring them into the program.
NOTE: The video you saved will not show up at this point. The program will show you only the still pictures in your folder.

Now you see the pictures in the middle of the screen in a section called 'Collections.' Your next step is to drag the pictures onto the timeline in the order you want them in your movie. First, make sure your program is in 'Timeline' view. The bottom section of your screen should look like this:

If the bottom of your screen looks like this, click on 'Show Timeline'

Now, click on pictures and drag them down to the timeline.

If you would like to see the movie so far, you can click on the Play button on the small player on the right side of the screen. Notice that each picture plays for 5 seconds by default. You can change that to almost any amount of time if you want to. To make a picture stay up for more or less than five seconds, click on the movie in the timeline. Move your mouse to the right side of the picture. When the cursor turns into a red two-way arrow, click and drag the picture to the right to make it last longer, or to the left to make it last for less time. Note that you must change the duration by clicking on the right border of the picture, not the left.

You need to save your work often in Movie Maker! You should always save often in any program, but Movie Maker freezes more often than the average program. So as a rule of thumb, every time you feel pleased with what you have done, click the save icon. When you save by clicking the save icon or by clicking 'File-Save,' you will save your project as a Movie Maker file. That means you can still edit it in Movie Maker, but you can't use it in any other program. I have included instructions at the end of the 'Audio' page on how to save your movie so it can be viewed in Windows Media Player, Real Player, or on a Mac.

Rubric
	5	3	1
Graphics:
Appearance	All graphics are clear and unpixelated	1 or 2 graphics are somewhat blurry	Several blurry graphics
Relevance	All graphics are relevant to topic	1 or 2 graphics are somewhat irrelevant	Several graphics do not belong
Timing	Graphics appear long enough to make their point, but not too long	1 or 2 graphics disappear too soon or remain for too long	Several graphics disappear too soon or remain for too long