Digital Hubby: The Making of a Superhero
(Continued)

More Ways to Take Make-Believe to a Whole New Level

 
iRefrigerator:

If you have a child who loves to draw, you know how quickly you can amass piles of paper which are painful to throw away and problematic to store. In our family, the budding young artist is our younger son, Caleb. Caleb draws incessantly, and his favorite subject is, of course, Spider-Man. Too good to toss, and too voluminous to keep, Caleb's body of Spider-Man artwork needed an appropriate venue for archiving and displaying.

Enter iPhoto. You may not realize this, but iPhoto is not just a great way to organize your digital photographs; it can be used to keep track of any kind of graphic or image. So why not make it your own digital refrigerator, where your childrens' artwork can be displayed safely out of the reach of paper-crumpling babies and jelly-stained fingers?

To do this, simply scan your children's artwork and then import the images into iPhoto. The easiest way to do this is to select all the photos in the Finder and then drag them onto the iPhoto window. iPhoto will import the images into a film roll just as it does with pictures from a camera. With that done, you can now share your childrens' artwork in the same variety of ways that iPhoto makes available for photographs. Create your own homepage, compose your own book of original artwork, display them as a slideshow, or publish them to a DVD.

Putting it All Together:

The beauty of iDVD is that it enables you to take all of your movies, photos, and artwork and put them together into a unified whole. For Caleb's birthday, I did just that, by giving him his very own Spider-Man DVD.

I started by importing our Spider-Man iMovie into iDVD. This was relatively simple. I simply needed to export the movie from iMovie to iDVD format, and then import the resultant movie into iDVD. Although simple, this two-step process was time-consuming, and I am looking forward to the tighter integration between iMovie and iDVD which the forthcoming release of iLife promises.

Next came the comic book. I could have simply imported the comic book pictures into iDVD and displayed them as a slideshow, but I felt that it would be anticlimactic for our DVD viewers to have to read the thought bubbles and sound effects off the screen. I therefore imported the images into iMovie first, where I put them to music, and added my own voice-over narration and sound effects. It was a little tricky trying to get the narration and sound effects timed properly with the images and music, but the result was, I think, much more exciting to watch.

Having finished turning my comic book into a movie, I simply imported it into iDVD as before.

Next came the still images. I scanned through all my photos in iPhoto looking for pictures of Caleb in his Spider-Man costume. (These weren't too hard to find, given the fact that it's all the kid ever wears!) I then imported these into iDVD, organized them as a slideshow, and put them to music (the soundtrack from the Spider-Man movie came in real handy here). I did the same thing with all of Caleb's Spider-Man artwork, and now had a menu of four different items which could be selected: the Cartoon, the Comic Book, the Photos, and the Artwork.

Now all I had to do was come up with an appropriate menu theme, and while nice, none of iDVD's built-in themes were quite appropriate. So I recorded a clip from the Spider-Man movie and imported it into iMovie. The clip showed Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York to a rousing soundtrack, so I didn't really have to edit it except for length. I then exported the movie and imported it into iDVD as the background video. The effect is really cool. The imported video does skip slightly when it loops back to the beginning, and I haven't yet figured out why (it appears fine within iDVD, and only shows up on the finished DVD), but even with the skipping, the DVD menu looks pretty cool, and of course, it has worked with every DVD player I've tried playing it on.