Death and Dying

My wife asked me to help edit her video for the "Death and Dying" class she is going to teach this summer.  She filmed a ten minute introduction in a local cemetery, sitting among the markers while going over the course objectives.


She asked me to make opening credits style introduction.  I thought of an old, possibly mid-60s horror movie.  First thing I did was  use Audacity's noise removal plug in to cut down on the ambient noise from her outdoor recording.  It was the first time I had ever tried it and it did a great job filtering out the breeze and other "white" noises.

Once I had rendered her cleaned up audio to the video,  I set that file aside and started a new project in OpenShot, a video editor similar to Window's Movie Maker, to make the title sequence.

OpenShot uses a time line to mix together several video and audio tracks at once.  The top layer is reserved for the text part of the credits.  Those were rendered by a Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor.  I wouldn't begin to know how to use Inkscape, but OpenShot has many pre-loaded templates included.  All I had to do was choose one, add my text and let it go.

 I used the other layers for the cemetery images from the video shoot.  Using some of OpenShot's video plugins and animation controls I added an inversion effect and then an animation control to give the images a vibration.  I used The Gimp, a great graphics program, to add some lightning effects to a couple of images and finally, Audacity to mix my audio files.

A couple of sites on the Internet offered some free sound files for the crickets and the lightning.  For a finishing touch, I used OpenShot's other title making plugin for a simple, 2D scroll across the first image.