This is a Guest Post by Nate Beaird.
I sent out a tweet a couple months ago asking people; “What’s the newest, coolest, somewhat useful website you’ve found in the last month or so?” Ryan Brancheau, fellow media director and Twitter friend, told me about this site, Animoto. Have you seen it?
It’s a site that produces photo montages (Picture slide show with music) for you! These montages are generally used in wedding ceremonies and receptions, graduation parties, birthdays, anniversaries, and even funerals. With Animoto, you just upload the photos, select music from their library, or upload a song from your computer and whiz, bam, boom….there ya go! Animoto takes just a few short minutes and makes you a very cool montage!
This is a great resources to anyone interested in using this feature for any of the said events, but also will work great for ministries! Take pictures of that outreach coming up, and make a rad follow-up video to show the church. Get together some pictures of Pastor So-and-So through the last 12 years of his ministry and make a cool “going away” video for him, something he can take and show his family. A new feature they just added is the ability to also add short 3-5 second video clips with the photos too!
You can do a 30 second version for free, which is great for sermon series bumpers. Or for $3, you can make a full length video. You can download it, share it, embed it, post it, and even request a DVD be mailed to you.
And if you thought all of that was really cool… they offer free “pro” accounts for non-profits.
Here’s a sample of how we used Animoto after a huge marriage series at our church. Now wait, I have to confess something. Although you can add text to your videos in Animoto, I downloaded the hi-res version of the video (with my free non-profit “pro” account) and added the text in Final Cut Studio.
Here it is:
Easy as pie.