Action Movie FX (free, iPhone and iPod touch) lets you film short videos and add Hollywood-style special effects such as explosions, tornadoes, and all manner of crashing vehicles. You can literally create your own—highly impressive—action scene in under a minute. Kids 9 and up will have no trouble recording clips and adding effects, but your results will improve greatly with these tips
Since objects included in the effects (smashing cars, explosions, crashing jets) always appear over real-life elements, you’ll want to frame your shots to fit: people standing behind two smashing cars shouldn’t appear larger than the cars themselves, and objects meant to have been blown to bits shouldn’t peek out from behind the smoking ruins of the explosion.
Consider how much time you’ll need leading up to the effect, and remember that the clip automatically ends when the effect ends. Some effects need a second or two to finish—in Missile Attack, a missile flies across the screen before striking its target area. You can fine-tune the placement of an effect in your clip later, but a little preplanning will help.
Once you start using Action Movie FX, you’ll start to look at everything you own as a potential explosion. Depending on how you zoom in on your objects, a cop car could crash into a real automobile or a Hot Wheels toy. Creative kids could assemble a movie that stars action figures instead of actors.
Action Movie FX clips can be emailed, uploaded to Facebook, and exported to iPhone’s Camera Roll. The 720p footage looks great on larger screens and can be easily incorporated into other video projects. Using the movie trailer templates in iMovie for iPad, we cut together a teaser for an imaginary disaster movie in only 15 minutes.
As mentioned in Step 4 above, the Movie Trailers feature in iMovie (File > New Project > Movie Trailer) is fun and easy for kids to do on the Mac. If you don’t have a separate video camera, you can record goofy footage, complete with effects, right in Photo Booth. To re-create your favorite Star Wars scenes, SaberFX ($29.99 in the Mac App Store, free trial at www.objectustech.com) lets you add lightsabers, explosions, and lightning bolts, but it’s best for kids 10 and up.
Add lightning and lightsabers with SaberFX.
