9. Creating Movie Themes and Trailers

Until now, you’ve learned how to assemble your movie manually by putting clips together, adding sounds and music, and interesting titles and transitions. But iMovie offers a few cool, semi-automated ways to make your movies look even better. In this chapter, you learn all about iMovie’s theme and movie trailers features that allow you to show off your movies to their fullest.

iMovie ’11 offers budding filmmakers two cool ways to beef up their movies. The first way is by using a feature called themes. A theme applies a specific look and feel to an iMovie project by adding opening and ending titles and transitions to your movies. You might be thinking, “But iMovie already allows me to do all that stuff!” And you’re right. iMovie does allow you to manually add titles and transitions to your movies. Where themes differ is that each one has a unique style and look that sets the tone for your movie. Themes use advanced animations (kind of like the ones found in DVD menus) in their transitions that really add flare to your movies in a way ordinary transitions can’t. Also, each theme automatically adds your titles and transitions as you create the movie, so you can make an eye-catching film with very little work on your part. When you make a movie project with a theme, you may not want to make one any other way.