Webinar "Makin' Movies with Joe Brennan"

This week I attended a webinar hosted by Discovery channel and through a WebEx environment we got a 1-hour session from Joe Brennan. The title was "Makin' Movies with Joe Brennan". For the people that don't know Joe: he is quite active and has a great blog on Digital Storytelling.

About 80 people participated in his free available webinar. For me it took place at 11.00 pm and it started out with a small problem because for the audio you had to call a US phone number. And it is impossible to call a toll-free number for free. After we started the session people with the same problem entered some questions in the chat-box and they came up with the idea to use Skype. Although I frequently use Skype for chats and audio conference I never used it to call 'normal' numbers so I didn't think of using Skype. It turns out that you can use Skype perfectly for calling toll-free numbers as well.


That was my first learning result and I learned quite a bit more. Joe showed us a lot of nice and simple techniques to create e.g. special effects. By showing us examples he made clear that imagination and some insights can create attractive videos. One of the techniques Joe showed us was playing with the pace in the video. He was talking about recording while one kid was walking slowly and other people were walking at normal speed. Later on you can speed up the video till the speed of the one kid is at 'normal pace'. The result will be exiting. What I liked about how examples was the fact that they were created without a lot of sophisticated technology but with easy to use and free or cheap applications. He was also talking about applications as Microsoft Photo Story. This app can be used for educational purposes very easily. I used it myself a few times and yes: easy and nice. And for the Dutch amongst us: it is free!

For me it was good to use WebEx again, it was already a few years ago, I only expect simple VOIP with such an application. Don't know why it was not possible with this session. I also learned a lot from the discussions that took place in the chat box. It was nice to exchange ideas during the session with the other participants.


Do yourself a favour and take a look at the Discovery site because they organize free quality webinars on a regular base. Enroll and enjoy! You can even watch recorded events.