Make a movie from pictures and words

To make pictures or short animations, check out our picture mixer. You can put a picture or a message for your friend in one of our prepared scenes. Some are animations, like the heart-shaped locket or the flying flag, others are stills, like the street billboard or the shoulder tattoo. All are ready to have your pictures and messages inserted in key 3D surfaces.

Flying Flag	Billboard	Heart Locket	Back Tattoo
Guitar	Sailboat	Card on Column	Wine Bottles
Candle	Photo Museum	Book	Shoulder Tattoo

Here are some other options for making a movie from pictures and words:

• Google's Picasa (a download) will let you easily convert a sequence of photos into a moving slideshow with a basic Ken Burns effect. If you have a blog, Picasa Web Albums is an easy way to create slideshows online and embed them in your blog. You could also try our own slideshow maker.
• If you have patience, and basic command-line skills, you could try the open-source dvd-slideshow program to achieve all sorts of fancy effects, and burn the result to a CD or DVD.
• If you're willing to pay, animoto produces very funky videos from your pictures and music.
• youtube.com has basic mixing and titling functions for videos you upload.
• jumpcut.com lets you upload and edit videos.
• dfilm.com has a nifty cookie-cutter online Flash animation maker.
• digitalfilms.com also has an online tool for making simple Flash animations.

On our site, you can make a slideshow of zooming images with our slideshow tool. It gives you an easy way to set up controlled Ken Burns effects, rather than the random zooms and pans of other tools. Here's an example:

We also have a tool for making 3D videos by blending your pictures and text with pre-prepared scenes. What exactly does this mean? The best way to understand it to try it. Watch the simple video below, then use the controls to put your own picture on the cake, with a different flying message:

Replace picture:

Like the idea but not the scene? More scene ideas here.

You can design your video based on a choice of scenes, viewing key frames in 3D. To make a complete movie, your design goes in a queue for generating a high-quality final result (this can take an hour or so). The movie can then be viewed online, or downloaded and posted to YouTube.

What now?

• Get started making movies!
• You can also make simple animations.
• See more example videos.
• Read more about this project.
• Read about Bozo, the project's creator.

External resources

• Read about Blender, the excellent open-source animation engine we use to make this all work.
• Get connected to the Blender community at BlenderNation.