Strangely enough, not everyone is comfortable talking on camera, or even holding a camera and pointing it at other things and talking, or even just pointing the camera at other things and not talking.  After years of laughing at Americas Funniest Videos, perhaps I had this unrealistic expectation that everyone likes to be videoed, and in particular people like to be videoed making an idiot out of themselves.  YouTube has backed up that myth, by the way.  Turns out that most people are camera shy, especially in libraryland, so finding people to talk on camera can be difficult.

image courtesy of flickr user peoplearestrange

Here’s some excuses:

• I hate the way I look on camera
• I’m in the witness protection program
• My voice sounds funny
• The camera adds ten pounds
• Why would anyone care what I have to say?
• Never in a million years, period.

If you’re one of these people, and everyone you work with is also one of these people, but for some reason you still want to make a video, or perhaps you’ve been delivered a mandate to make a video, then Slideshare might offer the alternative you’re looking for.  Most movie editors will allow you to use photos instead of video clips - take a series of photos, plug them into the movie maker, add a soundtrack of either music or narration (or both, if your movie maker allows two different soundtracks), adjust the amount of time each photo shows, add transitions, if you want (fade from one to the next, etc.), and voila you have yourself a movie.

Here’s something I’ve run into, though - when I tried doing this in the basic Windows Movie Maker, it crashed on me.  Repeatedly.  I’m pretty sure it had to do with the size of the photo files, but it might be that it just didn’t like me, and has a vendetta against me.  Sometimes it crashes when I try to make a video with too many clips, too.  When that happened, did i spend money on a better editor?  No!  I turned to another free solution, Slideshare!

Slideshare allows you to upload ppt slideshows to share with others.  You can leave it a slideshow if you want, or you can add an mp3 to it and make it a “slidecast.”  You can sync the slides to go with the music/narration - so that the slides change at appropriate moments in your narration.

Here’s one I made:  http://www.slideshare.net/crashsolo/car-repair-for-fvrl-members-presentation

I can see several good ways to use slideshare in libraryland:

• Presentations - if you deliver a presentation at a conference, a meeting, or wherever, you can post the slides to slideshare, and give people a link to go view them.  Slides by themselves don’t tell the story of the presentation, however, so you can record a version of you talk and synch it to the slides, creating a multimedia document of your presentation that others can view later.
• Tutorials - screenshots and photos can go a long way in instruction, and a voice over can finish it up.  I’ll admit my initial attempt at a car repair tutorial is pretty rough, but it was more for pitching the idea than for actual implementation.
• Events -  Staff, teens, etc. could collect photos, put them in an interesting order, add a musical soundtrack, and voila, you’ve got something interesting to watch that promotes library programs.  It might not have the splash of animoto, but it can be easier to control when the pictures appear, and when text appears, and for how long, etc.

One of the things I’ve struggled with with slideshare is that I can’t upload it to YouTube - something that would make it easier for me to work with.  However, it does have embed code so you can put it on a website or blog.  If my library were to make use of slideshare things like my car repair piece, we would just take the code and embed it where we thought it should go.

There are other slidecast/slideshow sharing sites out there, and I think the most recent version of powerpoint (the one I don’t yet have) allows you to turn your slideshow into a movie with sound.

Some other slideshow sites:

• Slideboom
• Slidesix
• Slide