Early Birthday Present

I met Heather Dixon today!!!

And she's just as awesome as I knew she was.

Yes, I said "was" and not "would be." Because I've been stalking her blog for a few months now and I just knew she was awesome before meeting her.

Actually, she's probably more than awesome.

And I could tell I was right about another thing--we definitely would have been friends if we'd known each other in college! She's so personable and fun and funny and, well, fabulous. Can't wait to see her again in a few days!

GoAnimate! OK.

I learned of a new site to try. It's an animator kind of site. The free account is extremely limited, giving you only a couple of scenes and a couple of characters to work with. But you get up to 10 lines of dialogue and it animates it for you. Which was funny to see how it turned out. I had no control over the voices and accents. Just what they said. It made my attempt at teens talking rather funny considering the office setting and the British/Australian accents! But it's all right for something extremely basic. I got a laugh at the result!

GoAnimate.com: Office Book Talk by MissHeidi

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

That's Better

But still not quite what I had envisioned back in March.


I was granted the non-profit Animoto account. It allows me more choices in music and styles. Access to their photo and video collection (which I don't remember if they were available with a basic account). Ability to have longer videos. But I still have no control over the timing of the pictures shown. If I want them to go by fast, then I have to pick a fast tempo song. I can choose to speed up or slow down the showing, but not do so with individual slides.

My Mac's iMovie would let me do that. But my lack of technical know-how would prevent me from creating the cool other effects as the slides move around, sometimes having "echo-y" effects and such that Animoto offers. Plus--I can make an Animoto video in a few minutes when my iMovies have taken anywhere from 1 hour to 5 hours! And not everyone has iMovie. So Animoto definitely serves its purposes.

For further comparison purposes, you can check out my other full-length remake of Heist Society.