Video project

Making videos is infinitely more difficult than one would expect!
My idea was simple - let's not "bite off more than we can chew" and do a simple technique! I'm not particularily technologically gifted so from the get-go I had challenges, plus computers shutting down on me unexpectedly, files mixing up or disappearing, and what not...
But let's go back to the beginning...
Originally when we were introduced to this project, I had the immediated idea to do an AIDS theme. AIDS has been something I've been focussing on a lot lately, especially around World AIDS Day (December 1) and looking forward to Stephen Lewis' visit here at Redeemer on January 22. AIDS is also incredibly significant, since it affects the lives of over 33.4 million people in our world...how can we not pay attention to it?
I wanted a simple yet poignant way to express the scope and size of this disease so I decided I would fill up a map of the world with red (the official 'colour' of AIDS) dots. Glancing through tutorial after tutorial on making animated movies, I decided that a simple enough method, would be to take an outline of the world, get rid of all the colour (black background, white outline) and then add one dot at a time, saving the file as a new one after each dot. This way, when all the files were lined up and set in motion, it would created the illusion that the world was filling up with red dots! Well, 500 jpeg. files later and I was done!
What a tedious process! It looked very effective, though...
I chose to have a black background because I wanted everything else that went on top of it to stand out. The text is white as well, which I was unhappy about, but there were no better alternatives available that I could find.
The fun did not end there. Importing the pictures to iMovie proved a lot more difficult than I expected, the files would not transfer in order and a actually had to go through file by file with only red dots as my guide, to put the stills in order.
Once the stills were in place, I had to add music and text. The song I chose is called "Ur" and it is done by DJ Tiesto featuring Aqualung. The words are very applicable to the theme and I love the way the music sounds and how it rises and falls. I tried to capture the best parts of the song by imserting the clip three times and trimming it to get the good parts. The transitions are a bit rough but it is close. I learned a lot about iMovie, watching tutorial after tutorial, but many were not specific enough and I was getting frustrated.
Over all I am fairly happy with the end result. I wanted people to be aware of AIDS, of how many and how far it reaches. As the dots fill up the screen more and more. I hope the viewer feels a sense of urgency, because the time to act is NOW...we've been sitting around too long, people continue to get infected and die at alarming rates - adults and children from every country and continent. Now is the time we must act if any difference is going to be made.
I hope you enjoy the video!