fun with pictures and music

okay students, this is a fun one.  This is like free play day or field day at school. 

It's probably always been on your pc, but you just ignore those cutsie little messages that the pc makers try to send you to get you to interested.  Don't lie to me.  You ignore that stuff just like I do.  You turn off those automated messages first thing.  So do I.

Let me tell you about this fun thing.  It's SOOOOOO easy!  You can make a movie!  It's basically a slide show put to music.  There is a windows program called Windows Movie Maker.  I didn't discover it until this mess began with my pictures.  So it may, or it may  not have always been on my pc.  Maybe it's new with Vista?  Maybe it's always been there buried under layers of other windows programs.  Who knows?  Who cares?  I found it now!   Dig around on your pc.  I found it when I was messing on windows photo gallery - which I never knew was there before.

It's so cool.  You put your selected pictures in whatever order you wish, you can add special effects, text, titles, music, video, narration and who knows what else.  And then you can burn them to cd and pass out to your relatives or send in email. 

Did I mention it was easy?  Trust me, it's easy!  And I think it's fairly intuitive, because I didn't real a single instruction and put together a cute little test movie of my marathon pictures.

This is so ideal for grandparents - so they can enjoy the year they missed and show off the grandkids to their friends - in a somewhat entertaining way.  I think it would be a wonderful replacement for those of us who are falling woefully behind in scrapbooks and can't even find the time to get pictures printed or digital pages made.

Now, you can probably do something similar in PowerPoint, but it's not something that I've tried.  I'm sure PP requires more time to figure it out.  I haven't used PP in years.  So maybe it's a more powerful tool?  You may could create something fancy in PP and add it to your movie?  If you're like me, you just want something fast and easy and looks good.

Have fun.  I know, that's not a lesson - but I never claimed to be a teacher!!  LOL!  I'm a facilitator.