Video Montages of Memories

In these times, we are on our phones more than ever. Yet, we’ve never been so far from friends and family. With the amount of free time on our hands, there are many things we could do to show those we care about that we’re thinking of them, no matter how far apart we are. Being everything digital, one of the perfect ways to do this is a video montage for your friend or family member. It sounds more difficult than it is, but all you will need are some videos, maybe a song, and basic movie editing software. Which can all then be emailed to who you’re thinking of, making for a perfect socially distanced gift!

First things first, the video editing software. If you’re a Mac or iPhone user, you’re in luck. Apple’s iMovie is simple for beginners, and is free on all their platforms. If you don’t have a Mac or an iPhone, don’t worry. OpenShot video editor is a simple and free video editing software, which you can get right here: https://www.openshot.org. Once you have your video editing software downloaded, you can collect all the videos of your friends. I’m going to make my video for my sister, as she’s all the way back in Calgary and I won’t be seeing her until Christmas.

First, start by importing your videos into your video editing software, which should be simple using a drag and drop into the program, or creating a new project and selecting the media you want.

Then, start to follow a few simple steps:

1. Crop your clips to the size you want. You can do this by dragging the edges of the clips to the desired length. You can crop them wherever, and be creative! Comedic timing is everything in videos like these.

2. Re-arrange the clips. Have some fun with it, move the clips around! You can do this by easily dragging the clips around each other. Be careful to not clip the edges of other videos.

3. Add some transitions. Drag and drop some transitions in between clips to give your video some funk! Pro-tip: fade the beginning of your video in to black, and then end it with a fade out to black. Add cross-dissolves in between these clips. All of these effects can be found in the transition library of your software.

4. Create some captions. Show off some editing skills! Add some hilarious captions to top off your video! Drag your captions onto the desired clips then double click to edit!

5. Jazz it up. Pick the perfect tune, and import it into the video. You can use YouTube to MP3 converters, or add songs that you already own into the video. Drag it under the clips, and create the perfect sound track for your picture perfect film. Pro-tip: Add an audio fade to the song, and crop it to the length of the video.

And there you have it, the simple five steps to creating your video. Export it, and send it in an attachment to your friend! Nothing beats the surprise they’ll experience when they go through the email and see the care you put into it! Be as creative as you want, and remember that the more clips and fun animations you put into it, the better it gets! Video editing may seem intimidating, but with this quick and easy how-to, it doesn’t have to be!