Digital Hubby: The Making of a Superhero

Taking Make-Believe to a Whole New Level

by David Lang (Posted: 1/28/03)

 
Welcome to the first installment of The Digital Hubby: a new series of articles designed to suggest creative ways Apple's "digital hub" applications can be used to enrich family life.

When I was a kid, I lived in a make-believe world of superheroes and arch-villains. I watched the Superfriends, Batman and Robin, and even Hong Kong Fooey with near-religious devotion. I listened to read-along storybook records about Spider-Man and Captain America. I had quite a collection of superhero action figures (please don't ever refer to them as dolls!), and was the proud owner of a shiny purple Batman cape, lovingly made for me by my first baby-sitter. While my friends had to settle for safety-pinning beach towels around their necks, I was decked out in style!

Now that I have kids of my own, I'm learning that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree (no pun intended!). My prized Batman cape now pales in comparison to my boys' collection of superhero costumes and paraphernalia; the latest crop of action figures make my old toys look downright crude; and my boys can now enjoy a substantial library of video-taped episodes of Batman, Superman, Justice League, Spider-Man, and X-Men: Evolution. These days, life is good for little boys with vivid imaginations (not to mention their reluctant-to-grow-up fathers!).

Thanks to the Macintosh and its suite of iApps, it is now possible for reluctant-to-grow-up fathers to take their sons' make-believe to a whole new level. By putting iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, and iDVD (henceforth to be known collectively as iLife) to creative use, it is possible to place your kids in the center of the action, and to give them something fun to share with their friends.

iToons:

With iMovie, it's easy to cast your children in their favorite cartoons. Here are a couple of examples using clips from Batman: the Animated Series and Spider-Man.

If your digital video camera has AV inputs, simply hook the camera's AV cable up to the Video and Audio Out ports of your VCR, and record the desired footage from your children's favorite cartoon, movie, or TV show. Import that footage into iMovie, along with your own home movies of the kids running around in their favorite costume pajamas, and then edit them together however you like. Here are a few pointers to make the job easier.

1. If you want to preserve the entire soundtrack of the recorded footage (as I've done in the examples cited above), you'll need to use iMovie's Extract Audio command. Doing so extracts the audio into a separate audio track, enabling you to remove sections of the video track (so that you can insert the footage of your kids) without losing the corresponding sections of audio.
   
   
2. The recorded footage will typically be imported into iMovie as a single long clip. To divide the clip into editable sections, use the Split Clip at Playhead command. If you wish to remove a section of the recorded footage, simply select the portion you wish to remove and hit Delete. The clip will be split at the point where footage was deleted.
   
   
3. Use iMovie's Transitions to create smooth transitions between the recorded clips and your own home movie clips. The more dramatic transitions can be used to good effect in some instances, but in most cases, you'll want to use subtle transitions such as Cross Dissolve and Overlap.
   
   
4. Add drama by speeding up or slowing down your home video clips, using Effects such as Flash or Ghost Trails, and/or adding various Sound Effects. You can also achieve some cool effects by reversing the direction of a clip. But remember, less is usually more when it comes to these kinds of enhancements. You want people to ooh and ahh over how cute your kids are, and they can't do that if you clutter your video with too many effects.