This past weekend, I decided to test my movie production skills by giving iMovie a whirl. Sunday was our housemate’s birthday, so I decided to surprise him with a video of his dog that I shot the weekend before at a lake up in Maine.

This 60-second iMovie was amazingly easy to put together. There are some things I could have done better — like the transitions and timing some of the text slides — but I managed to whip this together in about an hour.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was having to shell out a $29 fee for a QuickTime Pro registration. Why, you ask? Well, I needed to take the .avi video I recorded with a Canon S200 digital camera and convert that to a digital video QuickTime stream so I could import that clip into iMovie. But since this is something that I’ll probably do a few more times in my life, I figured the cost was worth it.

Another worthy investment was the $50 I spent to keep my mac.com address (er, get a .Mac account). The sound clip you hear in the background of the Happy Dog movie comes courtesy of the FreePlay Music, found on your iDisk in the /Software/Extras/FreePlay Music directory. The audio files come in 10-, 20-, 30-, and 60-second bytes as MP3 files (there’s also a full-length clip for each one, too). For this one, I used the 60-second clip titled “Shopping Spree”.

Okay, I know I’m not a video producer by any means, but iMovie is pretty easy to use for hacking together quick movies like this. Just imagine what I could do with a little more practice, footage, and sleep.

So, without further ado, I’m pleased to present Happy Dog, my crack at ripping off a Visa commercial.

Have an iMovie you’re particularly proud of, or willing to share some tips with me? Let me know (unless you’re Roger Ebert, of course).