Have you seen the movie Cloverfield? I watched it on the weekend and loved it mainly because of the way it is presented. One character uses a hand-held camera to document events as they unfold. Of course the events quickly take an unexpected and awful turn for the worse, but the characters don’t know that at the beginning of the movie. It is not a cheap production by any means and the continuity of the events as they unfold makes you wonder exactly how they created the scenes and edited the content.

I think we will see more and more of these types of movies due to the availability of hand-held digital cameras and their ease of use. The school library where I work has dozens of cameras that we regularly loan out to the students and teachers for school projects and events. Because of this I have learnt how to use them and then how to capture the video and edit the movies using the software on the pc’s. It is all so easy and the results can be fantastic. The students work is often outstanding as these digital natives have such an inherent ability to handle these tools in a fresh and creative way.

YouTube offers instant publication to a global audience. So some kind of success can be measured by the number of views that accumulate, as well as network spread.

My own humble attempts have been to use MovieMaker as photo stories as each of my three “children” turned 21. Adding music, using slide transitions, and combining still photos with video clips makes for a dynamic and interesting result that can be kept as a digital scrapbook. I plan to document my upcoming trip to Europe in this way. It is a heap of fun.