To me music is an incredibly important part in making any kind of video whether it’s a film or an instructional tutorial and although some may not have even noticed I honestly believe the library videos I’ve made wouldn’t be half as good nor would I have enjoyed making them half as much without the music.
Over the last few months I’ve spent quite a lot of time onthe Free Music Archive website looking for suitable background music for the tutorial videos I’ve been putting together and I love it because there is just so much brilliant (free!) musicout there which I never would have discovered without it.
So the purpose of this blog is simply to share some of the music I’ve found in the hope that others will not only enjoy it but will potentially find something they can use in their own projects.
It’s an eclectic mix which may reveal more about my own musical tastes than I should let on but the quality particularly from Dexter Britain is just phenomenal.
It’s in alphabetical order by song title because I have a weird thing about A-Z lists. I’ve used Soundcloud to embed the audio but if you click the song title you can find out a little more about the licensing info and download a copy for yourself.
With the upgrade to Summon 2.0 back in September 2013 I was faced with having to update some of our video tutorials. The previous videos were made using the traditional screen capture and commentary method – all very useful. All very instructive.
However I had two concerns about doing like for like remakes. Firstly I hate the sound of my own voice so the idea of recording a voiceover and then having to listen to it let alone share it with others wasn’t something I was very keen on. Secondly I find screencasts incredibly BORING and actually finding one you can sit through let alone enjoy is really difficult. So I wanted to try something a little different.
Finding these and others almost made things worse because I knew I didn’t have the time or resources to do something similar and every day I kept seeing the Camtasia icon on my desktop silently mocking my attempts to avoid the inevitable.
Then one day I came across a short animated video that caught my attention and at the end of the video the words: “Created using PowToon” popped up and I knew this was just what I had been looking for.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of PowToon before it’s an online presentation tool that allows you to create free animated videos and presentations just by dragging and dropping characters and objects. Finished videos can then be exported straight to YouTube.
My videos
The main goal for my first video was to present Summon in a fun and engaging way and even if the only thing people remembered was how to find Summon on the University website that would be enough for me to consider the video a success. My approach however was maybe a little unconventional.
youtube by Sean MacEntee (CC BY 2.0)
I had a series of images in my head I knew I wanted to use but essentially it all began with the music. I’d found some fantastic creative commons stuff on http://freemusicarchive.org which I knew would be perfect. So instead of merely being an afterthought the music became the main creative inspiration behind the whole video. It helped me determine what movements the characters should make, how long each scene should last and how the transitions should look.
I had lots of fun with the first Summon video, received positive feedback from colleagues and apparently it even got shown during a Summon demonstration at the National Library of Scotland.
So feeling encouraged to continue with PowToon I tried to focus my next series of videos on answering one question while still including music and some hopefully humorous touches (well humorous to me anyway):
How to renew a book online:
How to search for a journal article in Summon:
How to refine your search in Summon:
I was now starting to feel a little more confident and decided I really wanted to tell a story. So once again I started with a simple question: “How do I find databases relevant to my subject?”
In truth this could have been a 20 second video featuring nothing more than a few mouse clicks but where’s the fun in that. So instead I devised a scenario in which in order to rescue his girlfriend the main character has to access an English database. This of course sounds utterly ridiculous but was my attempt to try and use the power of storytelling to answer a simple question in an entertaining way.
Again I got more positive feedback and we even got a mention from ProQuest:
I fully accept that there will be people who think these videos are silly, amateurish and largely unhelpful but the point is that with the amount of free resources now available there is just no excuse for producing videos that do little more than bore your audience. Why not try something a little different?
Sadly I haven’t had time to work on new videos lately however with ProQuest moving LION onto a new (and much better platform) I will once again be faced with having to re-make a Library video. At this point I have no idea what I’m going to do but I’m sure I’ll have fun experimenting.
Finding journal articles part 3: ‘Mariachi Bandits of Gatling Gun Ridge’ by Krackatoa available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence at: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/krackatoa/
Over the last few months I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the Free Music Archive website looking for suitable background music for the tutorial videos I’ve been putting together and I love it because there is just so much brilliant (free!) music out there which I never would have discovered without it.
Pretending to be a librarian 