The diagram to the right shows the processes that are almost always used even if the tools used vary. The tools represented in the diagram are the ones I’ve used most. They’ve been chosen largely for ease of use and because they’re free.

1. Story development is done with notepads, flip charts and discussion.
2. Audacity was used to record and edit audio. Sometimes the audio was recorded on hand-held devices and ported in.
3. Picasa was used for simple image manipulation and primarily to crop images to a wide screen video format.
4. Windows Movie Maker was used to compile and render the final videos. Some people may be horrified at this as WMM is a pretty clunky tool and unlike the preceding tools it is not platform independent. However it’s advantages are that it is free and works offline (some of the venues had no internet) I’ve also found a workaround that allows timeline editing beyond Windows 7 and I’ve blogged that here.
5. The final part is to publish the story and this nearly always YouTube (and embedded in a website or blog) There are other video sharing sites and, of course CD or DVD could be used.