Animated birds over video? Help me amuse my tweet-heart

February 10, 2012 5:15 AM

Valentine's Day video: I'm a really babe in the woods with video, but I'd like to make a loving video for my real babe in the woods, if you know what I'm saying. I'd like to add animated, circling, twittering birds, as an overlay to my video. You know, the kind cartoon characters see when the get hit on the head with a mallet or stove.

I don't mind doing the searching learning myself, but I don't know where to begin. Can you Bright Ones suggest what I should be searching for in terms of: where to find said animation, and, the technique for applying animation over video?

FWIW, I'm using iMovie 11 on a MacBook. If it made a big difference, I can access Final Cut on another machine.

Thanks!

posted by largecorp to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Here's the TV Tropes entry on 'Circling Birdies' which may be of interest and here is the sound effect in wav format. I'm still looking into finding an animation for you.
posted by wannalol at 5:44 AM on February 10, 2012

Photo Booth will do it live but I don't know if iMovie will do it in post.
posted by Kyol at 6:00 AM on February 10, 2012

Photo Booth's Dizzy Effect looks perfect, especially if combined with the sound effect I linked to previously. If you had access to that you could use it to create that one scene or maybe shoot the video against an improvised green screen (to isolate just the circling birds) and import it into an existing iMovie project. I don't have access to Photo Booth or iMovie so am not sure how to go about it.
posted by wannalol at 6:16 AM on February 10, 2012

Response by poster: Wow, fantastic idea! Never would have thought of photobooth!
posted by largecorp at 6:51 AM on February 10, 2012