Make A Video Without Shooting Video

The challenge is on. You are to make an amazing two-minute video in under two hours. The subject can be anything you like. But here's the catch... you aren't allowed to shoot video.

First, gather some pictures and Photomosh them, saving them not as images but as gifs/webm.

Find a royalty free soundtrack that will underpin your movie.

Then, spend half an hour playing with Adobe Spark, or Renderforest or Lumen5 to see if they can be of use to you. 

And finally, you can bring all your pieces, the fragments, the pictures, the audio, the generated movies together in the excellent Clipchamp.

 

 






Resources

 

Here are some places to get pictures and sounds. Go get a little collection of maybe ten or so images perhaps. They might have a theme, or tell a story. It's up to you.

Think about how long you are aiming your video to be. Is it one minute, or five? It would be good to find a backing track that was roughly that. Maybe you could use some sound effects for certain parts of your video? 

 

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Royalty Free Soundtracks

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/full_list.php
Great list of Creative Commons audio files

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BBC Sound Effects

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/

16,000 BBC sound effects for personal, educational or research purposes.

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Royalty Free Video Clips

https://www.pexels.com/videos/

Lots of royalty-free videos to use. Can you tell a story with these sorts of videos?

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Royalty Free Video Clips

https://pixabay.com/videos/

Another place to find free video clips to use.



Tools

Lots of these tools, Lumen5, Headliner, Motionden let you make moving content without using video footage. Go make lots of little pieces and figure out what those tools are best for?

With tools like Clipchamp (online) and OpenShot (desktop) you can sequence your short video fragments and sounds effects together, and add a soundtrack.

What would your voice over say?

 

 

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Clipchamp

https://app.clipchamp.com/editor

Quite advanced video editing. 

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Photomosh

https://photomosh.com

Make gifs and images with a heap of bizarre effects

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OpenShot Video Editor

https://www.openshot.org/

Free video editor

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Renderforest

https://www.renderforest.com/

Create animated explainer videos, animations and more easily. I made this movie ident in a few seconds

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Lumen5

https://lumen5.com
Turns your web pages or articles into video. Amazing

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Headliner

https://www.headliner.app/
Really interesting online video maker. I made one from an article I'd written.

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Animaker

https://www.animaker.com
Create animated explainer videos, whiteboard videos and dynamic typography videos.

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Adobe Spark Video

https://spark.adobe.com/about/video
Quickly create fun videos



Learning

The Filmmaker's Toolkit has lot good advice about how to think about and plan your piece.

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The Filmmaker's Toolkit

https://www.acmi.net.au/education/online-learning/film-it/

Lots of great resources to help you learn about screenwriting, cinematography and storyboards.