How do you create a rapid response videos when you have no money and hardly any video editing skills? Use iMovie.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland emphasized the need to stop political violence on the eve of the Jan 6th insurrection. The Attorney General spoke for 34 minutes with no visual aids. It's a strong, urgently needed message, but the video is too long for many people and not easily shared on social media.
Videos dominate the battle for mindshare on social media. So it's important for activists and organizers to be able to create persuasive videos. Creating rapid response videos quickly about events in the news, lets them make the most of the news cycle to get more exposure for free. This blog explains how Megan Matson, a Lincoln Project board member and DemLabs, converted the Attorney General's speech into a minute long, rapid response video.
Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney General
How to create rapid response videos with iMovie
iMovie is a free, versatile and easy to use application from Apple. This is how Merrick Garland's speech was converted into a short 1.2 minute video in about two hours. It was captioned in both English and Spanish.
- The public 24 minute video was imported into iMovie along with the images to overlay and a short, free soundtrack from DJ Lazy Spoon.
- The opening sequence is a 3 second video of the Jan 6th insurrection.
- Next we added the logo of the Department of Justice and Merrick Garland's title as the form of a caption which is a standard iMovie feature.
- The sound track is configured to fade out as the Attorney General begins to speak.
- Short ten second clips from the source video were chosen along with the corresponding image to show with them.
- The images and videos are overlaid so you can hear Merrick Garlands words as the image changes.
- iMovie allows you to add both images and videos as overlays.
- The ideal length on the video for social media should be about 20 seconds, but in this case the video length is 1.2 minutes as there is a lot of important information to share.
- During the course of the video, the camera zooms into the Attorney General using a standard iMovie feature.
- The closing credits appear as a caption.
- The music soundtrack appears at the opening and ending of the video.
- iMovie allows you to choose the soundtrack to play and at what volume.
- The video was then captioned in English and also translated into Spanish.
Learn basic video editing skills for free
Videos dominate the battle for mindshare on social media. So it's important for activists and organizers to be able to create persuasive videos. Creating rapid response videos quickly about events in the news, lets them make the most of the news cycle to get more exposure for free. DemLabs is conducting free training webinars on how to create rapid response videos with iMovie. Apply for a spot here.