His fingers in his face

by William Jackson on 2007-01-23

This movie was made with iMovie HD on an Apple Mac G5. Total time spent: less than three hours. iMovie has an incredibly easy learning curve. I canʼt wait until I own my very own Apple computer.

I started with the picture selection. Most of them, including the screenshot of my hacked website, I already had on my (now non-hacked) website, so they were easy to procure. The images I had to generate today were the screen capture of my non-hacked website — I donʼt know why I didnʼt have one already — and the screen captures of Facebook and MySpace.

The background music was obtained with questionable legality, from the Gnutella network. My client of choice is Shareaza on Microsoft Windows.

That was a feat of networking skill worth explaining: I logged in to my home computer using Remote Desktop Connection, fired up Shareaza, found a suitable file, and downloaded it. I then transferred it to my server not two feet away (via my home network).

After that, I opened Fugu on the Mac, connected to my home server and copied the file locally. Finally, I dropped it into iTunes, and I then could access it in iMovie. What a party.

The voiceover was recorded here in the lab with an inexpensive USB headset. I found out I canʼt improvise to a computer screen, so I typed out everything I wanted to say, then read it.

Throw it all together, tweak the transitions and volume levels a bit — the music was loud! — and export it. Set up an account on YouTube, verify my email address, give it at least one tag (that was annoying), upload it, wait a few minutes, and here I am.

This was so much fun. I want to make more cheap, cheesy movies.