Episode #74
Customizing iMovie Themes

I’m a junior science teacher (Magee Secondary School) and this year instead of reviewing for finals the old fashioned way (paper and pencil). I asked the students (grade 8?s) to create a 3 minute video on a topic that we covered this year. The videos will be posted on our school’s site mageelions.ca (click on Podcast on the left side). Before they were permitted to record, they had to find other videos and information that was online and put it on a wiki. Secondly, they created a storyboard (http://rozitis.ca/AppleProject/index.php?TopicsForBookVideo). They found lots of videos but not with explanation of the science and this is what I wanted…for example what is the science behind coke and mentos. The students used cameras on the Macbooks to record right into iMovie…edited the movie and couple of groups used GarageBand to create a jingle. They had 4 periods to take the video and edit it. Now my question: How do we change the background pictures of the Themes in iMovie? This is a little late for this year…I would like to show the students next year. This years videos (nearly 40) will be on the school’s site by the middle of June (I hope). It is amazing to see the students take pride in this project. Thanks for your help.

Christopher, Vancouver, BC



What a wonderful use of technology. I applaud you!. These themes are stored in the computer, and you're gonna go to your "library application support," "idvd" and "installed themes," and you'll see -- .theme packages. now, this is not -- it looks like a file, and this is another elegant thing in the mac os x operating system is that programs, themes, thing like this, that actually look like files aren't really files. this is a folder. it's a folder. it's a special kind of folder called a package. it looks like a single file. you can double-click it. it would open idvd. but if i control-click on it or right-click on it, if i have a two-button mouse, you'll see i can "show package contents," and that treats it like a folder. the resources contain a variety of tiffs- a variety of graphics files that can be modified. now, there's other things you don't want to modify or do if you know what you're doing, but don't mess with them if you don't, but you will modify the tiffs. and so any photoshop or any graphics program -- you can see there's "thumbnail.tiff", and "background tiff."

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