One of the beautiful things about the digital revolution is the widespread availability and accessibility of tools which make it easy and enjoyable to create content for personal or professional reasons. It means that those of us with, ahem, somewhat limited technical knowledge and skills can publish our thoughts, ideas and experiences to our immediate social or professional circles, or even farther afield with a little help from our BFF, the internet. The task for thing 9 was to create a screencast for sharing to Youtube or Vimeo, but as I’ve fallen behind with my things (due to starting a new job and life interfering with my CPD plans), I’m going to exercise a little creative interpretation, and instead relate my experience of using Cameo (a video-editing app) to create and share a video. Cameo is owned by Vimeo and is a free app you can get on itunes which will allow you to shoot and edit a simple short video on your iphone. My favourite part though, is that you can then “apply themes, add titles, and browse a rich music catalogue to create a professional-looking short film that feels personal.”
Below you can see a short, *highly* sentimental, and not-very-professional-looking video I made when we moved out of our old library (housed there since the 1980s) into a new, modern, purpose-built library. After a prolonged period of building works we were dying to get into the new building, but I wanted to make a keepsake of the place where many of us had spent happy years and share it with our students on the Library’s FB page. Although I must admit – this one was as much for the library staff as for the students! So I stitched together the many short clips I had shot on my phone in a short amount of time, chose a theme, a song I like from Cameo’s music library (by Widowspeak), added a title and credits and hey-presto! I had made a video! The result could have been much more polished if I had spent more time on it – but for a free app I must say it was very enjoyable and easy to use. I also think the hand-held feel and nostalgia-soaked filters are familiar territory for third-level students so hopefully they can relate with the stories that your library chooses to share, should you decide to give it a whirl. It could be used to create mini-videos of events or exhibitions held in your library-space and I highly recommend trying it out if you have an iphone and an hour or two to spare.
thelivedinlibrarian 