Making the Rudolph Music Video (a Web 2.0 story)

Join me on a little diversion from Ed Tech, to explore some fun Web 2.0 tools that I use to create music videos.

I occasionally get asked what it takes to create videos like the one I made to accompany this year’s “musical Christmas card”, my version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (or last year’s rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”). A fundamental concept behind what is now commonly referred to as “Web 2.0” was the transition from Internet surfers mostly just pulling content from the Internet to the wide adoption of tools to create and ‘push’ content out to the Internet. Many of the tools I used to create this video are the kinds of tools that have helped enable this transition.

Naturally, it starts with the music, but that’s really a separate discussion. Suffice it to say that I used my Korg D3200 Digital Studio (a powerful yet affordable ‘studio-in-a-box’ from Korg) to record and engineer the music. What I’m going to focus on in this post is the making of the video.

Gathering and Creating the Content
First I needed the visual content – the collection of photos, pictures, and video clips that would be used to compile the music video. Some of these I took or made myself, like the pictures of the stuffed Rudolph toys or the elves with the guitar (I made this using Microsoft Paint, which as you are all probably aware, comes free with the Windows Operating System). Others I searched out and found on the Internet. After having learned about Creative Commons a few months ago, I made a point of seeking out images that were free to use and manipulate...

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