People have been asking me for a while for some tips on how to make a good video, and I’ve been saying that I’ll try to put together a resource with some tips on how to make a good video. But why reinvent the wheel?
I recently discovered Vimeo’s Video School. It’s basically a bunch of tutorials on how to make a video, with everything from filming to editing. I haven’t had a change to watch every single video, but from what I have seen it looks pretty good! So if you want to learn how to make movies, head over there now.
Here’s one of the videos from the Video 101 series.
A Gravtar is a Globally Recognised Avatar. It’s a picture that you associate with an email address, and whenever you comment on a blog with that email address, your picture will show up next to your comment.
Last weekend, my wife Alice and I launched a new blog called Practising Hospitality. It’s a Christian Hospitality blog focussed on learning more about hospitality, living out hospitable lives and loving being hospitable.
Both Alice and I are writing posts for the blog, and we’ve got some great content lined up over the coming months. So go over there and check it out! And while you’re at it, why don’t you subscribe to it as well.
For those of you who have an interest in blog design. I built the blog on the standard theme (affiliate link) using WordPress. A lot of what I have implemented I have learnt from John Saddington the Tentblogger, if you haven’t before, you should go and check out tentblogger.com, it’s an amazing website for learning about blogs!
Below I have listed some of the features of the website
Edited code to change the colours of the theme (as well as a few other elements)
This was an exciting day for me as it has been a project that I have been working on for a few months now, and it has finally come to fruition.
I’ve really enjoyed this web project, and I’m hoping to continue to do some more web projects in the future (Stay tuned for an exciting blog that my wife Alice and I are working on).
For those who care about the features of the site, some are listed below.
Rolling image section on homepage
Sharing options on News posts and songs pages
Audio players with snippets of songs
Integrated Google Custom Search (Thanks to Tentblogger for this helpful post)
Options to buy songs and lead sheets through PayPal
Ability to download PPTs and song lyrics for free
I applied a style guide that was given to me
Custom contact forms and ability to sign up to an email list
If you have been following my Twitter feed recently then you will know that I have just bought Pixelmater for Mac. It’s a great Photoshop alternative that only cost me $29 (half price)!
I’ve been wanting to get something like Photoshop for a while, and although Gimp is a great free alternative with plenty of features. It’s very clunky and hard to use. Thankfully, Pixelmator was on sale over at MacUpdate and I snapped it up.
This will hopefully be the start of some more serious design work over the summer and I’ll be trying to teach myself plenty of new skills. In order to show off some of my work, I’ve set up a Flickr account. You can view all of the stuff that I upload at http://www.flickr.com/photos/calumhenderson/.
Here is one of the designs that I have made using Pixelmator. (Click on image to enlarge)
This is an image that I made by following this tutorial. I watermarked the image for no other reason than the fact that it was really easy to do.
Below the break are a few more images that I have put up on Flickr.
Blue writing on a black background is nearly impossible to read at the best of times, so please reserve blue text for highlighting links on a white background…
Also, yellow text on a white background is no fun.
And if you ever use a pink background for anything…
Consider good colour choice when designing a PPT presentation. Check out this site for some hints.
Have you seen any other colours that have hurt your eyes in a presentation?
The new iPhone was announced earlier this week by Apple, and I for one am very excited by the possibilities that this new device will have for Ministry.
High Def video looks great. Example, view this YouTube video that I made in full screen and make sure that you have it set to 720p.
Looks sharp eh? That’s because there are heaps more pixels in that video, meaning greater detail and more prettiness.
When the new iPhone is out and about in a few months, you will be able to use your phone to make videos of this quality!
Another exciting announcement was the release of iMovie for iPhone, which means that you can edit these movies right on your iPhone, and publish them to YouTube. You’ll be able to get the videos that you make out very very quickly!
I’m imagining people in ministry being able to make a really quick, really high quality videos, whenever they want. These could include leaders sending out videos to group members instead of a long email, or it could mean a very quick advertising video being made, or it could mean a video showing how fun an event was will be that much easier to make. Possibilities!
I’m excited to use these new features, and you’ll be sure to find some iPhone 4 made videos right here at calumhenderson.com in the coming months.
This is Calum's personal blog where he writes about a range of topics, mainly focussing on technology, ministry and the Bible. Feel free to scroll through recent articles or browse through the archives to see all posts dating back to 2009.
