Operation Gadget Films is pleased to present Jimmy’s Snowy Day starring my two-year-old son Jimmy Aiello in his streaming video debut. This short film (2 minutes and 40 seconds) was shot on February 22, 2008, near our home in Newtown, PA.
This movie was shot with a Nokia N95 mobile phone, one of the best small standard-definition video cameras I’ve ever seen. It produces 640×480 video at 30 frames per second, which makes it great for home movies like this. I received this phone courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations program. This is the first movie I’ve ever shot with it that I’ve shown to the public.
I edited the movie using iPhoto ’08, part of the Apple iLife ’08 package that I got for free when I bought my MacBook Pro in March. It took me a while to start making movies using iMovie ’08, but I now have an large amount of video from the Nokia N95 and this is the third finished movie that I’ve produced.
I was suprised at how well the N95 worked with the iLife suite. All of the video and digital photos from the camera are imported into iPhoto ’08 when you connect it to your Mac. New video clips are picked up automatically from the iPhoto library by iMovie ’08 each time the application is launched. iMovie imports the video into its library and generates key frames that are used to place the clips in your project. The process takes time, which depends on how much video you are importing and some iMovie settings.
I feel like I’m already pretty good at using the features of iMovie ’08 and I’m becoming pretty skilled at getting the most out of the N95’s video capabilities.
As I said earlier, this is the first video I’ve ever shown to the public. I’m using the video sharing site called Viddler. I chose Viddler because it allows me to keep control over the videos that I create, so I can control who looks at them. I also have the right to pull my videos off of their service at anytime. I think retaining ownership of creative work is an important right, and I should have the ability to show my work to others without losing ownership and control of it.
I watched the movie after it was encoded on Viddler, and I think it looks pretty good. The Viddler version of the movie is a lot more pixellated than the MPEG 4 version that I have on my Mac. I think the reason it is this noticeable in this movie is because of how high the contrast is in every frame.
I’d be very interested to hear what you think of the movie. Feel free to comment on Viddler, here in this post, or by emailing me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com.