If you have Windows XP, you already have Microsoft Movie Maker, the program that makes creating professional-quality movies fun and easy. In this six week course you'll learn to edit out the not-so-good content, and organize the good content into great, entertaining movies. You'll learn how to add titles and credits to movies just like the pros.

This course will take you through all the basics with easy step-by-step instructions and plenty of illustrations and hands-on exercises. Once you have the basics down pat, you'll discover how to add still photos to your movies, and how to make still photos from your favorite video scenes. You'll learn all about adding special effects, background music, sound effects, voice narration, and more. Finally, you'll learn how to share your cinematic masterpiece with family and friends by e-mail, the Web, CD, and DVD.

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Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Making movies can be a lot of fun--if you know the basic tools, techniques, and terminology involved. This first lesson provides the foundation you'll need to get started. You'll discover how to open, use, and close Windows Movie Maker, the moviemaking program that comes free with every copy of Windows XP. You'll also get some raw footage to use as we begin working together to create a movie.

Friday - Lesson 02

If you've ever used your own video camera to shoot video, you've probably ended up with some good stuff on tape and some stuff that wasn't so good. An example of not-so-good stuff would be the 15 minutes of footage of the ground rushing by that you got when you accidentally left the camera running while it dangled from your neck. One of the first steps in creating a movie is separating the good footage you want to show from the bad footage, which you want to discard. You'll discover how to do this today.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Though you might never have noticed, virtually every movie and TV show you've ever watched was a story told through a series of short video clips, and each clip was only a few seconds long. Your movie will be no different. Today, you'll discover how to arrange the footage you've chosen to show in your movie into a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. You'll learn to make your movie as interesting to your viewers as movies they pay to see in theaters!

Friday - Lesson 04

Whenever you save a movie, you're faced with all kinds of choices about video quality. This type of quality has nothing to do with whether the movie is good or bad. Rather, it has to do with technical things like bit rate, dimensions, aspect ratio, frames-per-second, and other terms you may never have heard before. But fear not! You'll discover in this lesson that these things are not difficult to understand. And once you know what the choices are, you'll find it easy to choose exactly the quality you need to meet your specific purpose.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

One of the best things about making your own movies is that you can add your own special effects. Windows Movie Maker comes with dozens of them that you can freely use however you like. When your friends see your special effects, they'll be astonished. They'll figure you must be some sort of computer genius! But just between you and me, special effects are really easy to use. Today, you'll find out just how easy!

Friday - Lesson 06

Sometimes you need text to appear on the screen during your movie. For example, a title at the beginning of it is a great way to tell viewers what they're about to watch. And what movie would be complete without rolling credits at the end? There may even be times when you need to put some text right in the middle of a movie. As you'll discover in this lesson, all of these things are easy to do, thanks to Movie Maker's Titles and Credits feature.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Do you have some great photos you'd like to share along with your movie? If so, you can pull them right into your movie and present them like a slideshow. Ever wished you could take just one little piece of video and make it into a still photograph? Well, wish no more because Movie Maker makes this easy too! Today you'll find out just how amazingly simple it is to put photos into movies, and to create photos from video.

Friday - Lesson 08

If you walked into a laboratory and took video of people peering into microscopes, what would you have? Boring video of people peering into microscopes. But what would you have if you added a little dramatic background music? A smash-hit forensics show like CSI! Background music sets the mood of a movie or scene. As you'll discover in this lesson, adding background music to your own movies is a breeze in Windows Movie Maker!

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Did you know that virtually every movie and TV show is loaded with sound effects? Everything from the canned laughter you hear in sitcoms, to the slaps, punches, and whooshes you hear in action movies is a sound effect that was added after the footage was shot. You can add sound effects to your movies too. You don't even need to create them because, as you'll learn in this lesson, most of the sound effects that the big production companies use are readily available for free download form the Internet.

Friday - Lesson 10

If background music and sound effects aren't enough to fill out your movie, you can always add your own voice. If you like, you can narrate your entire movie from beginning to end. Or, you can just sneak in an occasional comment or joke. Whatever works for the movie you're creating. Movie Maker makes creating narration easy by enabling you to watch your movie as you speak. You'll see how this works today.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

After all your hard work creating a movie, you'll surely want to show it to other people. Windows Movie Maker offers three ways to share your cinematic productions: E-mail, the World Wide Web, and CDs. In this lesson, you'll discover the advantages and disadvantages of each method. After today, you'll always know how to present your masterpieces in the best possible light.

Friday - Lesson 12

Even though CDs and DVDs look exactly alike, there's a world of difference between them. Neither Windows XP nor Movie Maker have the ability to copy files to DVDs. But, that doesn't mean you can't do it. As you'll discover in our final lesson, if your computer has a DVD burner and some DVD authoring software, you can create custom DVDs from the movies you make. Doing this will allow anyone with a DVD player and TV to watch your movie, no computer required!

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Alan Simpson.

With over 100 published books to his name, award-winning author Alan Simpson is widely regarded as a PC and Internet guru. His books have been published throughout the world in over a dozen languages. As a seasoned veteran of the computer industry, Alan's books and online courses cover virtually all aspects of the computer industry, including Web development, operating systems, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, programming, networking, and security.

Requirements:

Microsoft Windows XP, Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

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