Unleash your inner Spielberg

I’m sure all of us have, at one point or anoth­er, dreamed of releas­ing that movie dir­ect­or deep inside, and mak­ing our own movie, com­plete with music and spe­cial effects.

Well, if your dream is to make one that hearkens back to the golden days of silent cinema, then I’ve got an inex­pens­ive app for you.

Silent Film Dir­ect­or, released today, can help you make movies in a style remin­ensent of the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood sil­ver screen.

It’s a very slick app that lets you shoot, edit and share movies on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad (in Uni­ver­sal mode).

Ver­sions
There’re two ver­sions avail­able, the stand­ard ver­sion and the pro ver­sion (an in-app .99 upgrade).

With the stand­ard ver­sion you can:

• Cre­ate Silent Films with a vari­ety of video effects includ­ing B&W, 20’s, 60’s home movie, sepia, sepia vin­tage, 70’s home video.
• Cus­tom­ize video speed and quality
• Add soundtracks to video
• Record video or upload from shar­ing folders
• Share video with pop­u­lar Social Net­works and enter developer-sponsored contests

With the pro upgrade you get the abil­ity to trim video, add sep­ar­ate title cards, trans­ac­tions, mix video with pictures.

How it works 
Silent Film Dir­ect­or has basic­ally stream­lined the work­flow of mak­ing a movie to:

Get­ting Clips
Clips are the sec­tions of video needed to make your movie. You can either shoot your video or import it via FTP or iTunes File Transfer.

Trim­ing / Edit­ing clips, adding title cards & trans­itions (Pro Version)
Using the in-app pur­chase, you can trim your clips (essen­tial for tight­en­ing your shot and pacing) and insert fade and circle-wipe trans­itions, as well as cre­ate and insert title cards and still photos.

Arrange your clips and transitions
In a very cool timeline lay­out, you build your movie, insert­ing ele­ments as needed (title cards, trans­itions, pho­tos and clips).

Cue the audience
Once you’re happy with your cre­ation, you render it down to a final movie, and then you can share it on You­Tube, Face­book, or through email. As I did with this one.

Side­ways?
One con­cern I had ini­tially when play­ing back a movie I’d sent through email, is that the iPhone image ori­ent­a­tion is ver­tic­al, not hori­zont­al as most movie cam­er­as are.

So when I played back the movie, my play­er, VLC, did­n’t com­pensate for this ori­ent­a­tion and the movie was played back side­ways. That prob­lem van­ished when I uploaded the same movie to Flickr — obvi­ously Flick­r’s soft­ware was smart enough and com­pensated automatically.

Evol­u­tion
Accord­ing to Mac­phun, the developer, Silent Film Dir­ect­or is a very sig­ni­fic­ant and enhanced update to a pre­vi­ous app called Vin­tage Video Maker and as such, will be a free update for own­ers of Vin­tage Video Maker.

“…we have quite a lot ded­ic­ated fans, who use Vin­tage Video Maker quite often, and we did­n’t want to make them pay for anoth­er app.”

As well, Mac­Phun is host­ing a Silent Film Dir­ect­or con­test at You­Tube — just sub­mit your cre­ation through a spe­cial but­ton in the shar­ing screen in the app.

Silent Film Dir­ect­or is cur­rently 60% off, priced at .99 in the Apple Store, and the Pro upgrade is a .99 in app purchase.

And if you’re into mak­ing vin­tage movies with your kids — it’s a heck of a lot of fun!

Update: The developer has also made some addi­tion­al resources avail­able at Silent Film Dir­ect­or (the applic­a­tion website).
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