This month ... making movies.

Have you and your students ever wanted to be in movies? With a little utility on the Macintosh Hyperstudio CD-ROM, you can be. The utility is called "Convert to Movie" and it can be found in the QTVR Tools folder. It's a terrific little utility. All that you need to do is provide some graphic files which represent the frames of your movie and it ties them them all together and creates your movie in Quicktime format.

I entitled this project "Time Passes". Here's the resulting movie.

Here's how I created it.

My famed lack of creativity comes into play. Just what do you make a movie of? I love my Candy Clock so I figure that I'll use it as the subject of my movie.

This could be a twelve hour project!... or it's considerably quicker to just change the clock on the computer. Set it for 1:00am and take a picture. Set it for 2:00am and take another picture. Repeat until you get all twelve hours taken. Convert to Movie needs all of the pictures stored in the same place and all of the files labelled sequentially. No problem. I create a folder entitled "Clock" and put all of the picture files there. Sequentially, they are all labelled "Image.1", "Image.2", ... "Image.12". Click here if you wish to download an archive of all of the files.

At this point in time, "Convert to Movie" takes over. The program runs and wants to know the first frame in my movie. It's "Image.1". Next, what's the last frame? "Image.12". Provide an output file name and check the option that will allow the movie to run under Windows and the movie gets saved.

The utility also does a terrific job of compressing the results. Each of the PICT images are 68K in size with the resulting movie being 58K in size.

Now to Hyperstudio.

In a new card, select "Add a Button". You want to add a movie, so select that option and then locate your movie. Once located, you'll notice that there are all kinds of options for playing your movie such as showing the first frame (or if not selected, the movie appears from nowhere), show the movie controller to the user, or even to play your movie in a loop. Select the options that appeal to you, grab some popcorn and watch the movie!