How do you get a flurry of images in your head into a concrete description of a film so that you can produce it? One important step is to create storyboards. For the storyboards on Lunatics, I've used a variety of approaches, from rough sketches on index cards to found photos and collages.

In my recent article on QDVDAuthor, I skipped over the task of making a videoloop for the main DVD menu. Here I’m going to show you how I did it. The goal is a short loop of video that smoothly transitions through five different video segments and back to the beginning again.

I found a useful sound effect in an online video from NASA which replaces an earlier temporary sound I used in a scene soundtrack for the Lunatics pilot, "No Children in Space." I'm going to extract the sound from the video (with VLC), cut out the sound I need, clean it up, and insert it into an existing sound mix (all with Audacity).

Audacity is a really popular open source audio editor used by many people to make podcasts, create ringtones, remove vocals, and pretty much anything else you want to do with sound files.

"...The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing "Happy Birthday to GNU," a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry..."

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Tuesday, September 2, 2008 -- The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing "Happy Birthday to GNU," a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry..."

Kino is a video editor that allows you to produce your own video masterpieces using only free and open source software. With it, you can capture and edit clips from your video camera, add titles, insert still images, create transitions between scenes, and output the result in a number of formats. Best of all, it's easy to learn to use.

Audacity's follow-up to its cult-classic audio editor, Audacity 1.3, warrants the attention of amateur and "prosumer" music editors. Audacity 1.3 adds minor (though useful) editing effects, and greases the wheels with some time-saving functionality.

I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s computers, and I see Audacity installed on a lot of them. Not many software programs deserve the adverb “versatile”, but Audacity is one of them. It is the Swiss Army knife of audio applications.