Tutorial: How to Create A Video With Lumen5

ByElizabeth Harrin Last updated: Uncategorized

Cisco predict that 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2020. YouTube is thought of as the second-largest search engine. Pinterest has exploded in recent years. Visual, easily-understood communication is what your project stakeholders are seeing everywhere else. It’s what they’d love from you, about your project too.

I’ve talked in the past about how I’ve used video as a communication tool on projects. However, it’s something that I think people find a bit daunting, and I’ve never gone into much detail about how you can actually do it.

So below I share a tutorial for a new tool that makes making video easy. And it’s free (for now, anyway). Lumen5 is an online tool for making simple videos from text you supply. The tool sorts out the transitions, images, music and makes it look professional. Plus you can download the .mp4 video file. The tool is in beta, so it will move to a paid-for model in the future. However, I think it’s worth trying out for free now, if only to get a bit more confident with making videos about your project.

Ideas for Videos

What can you actually use video for? Once you get started you’ll think of lots of ideas, but here are some to kick you off:

  • Introducing team members on a virtual team: photos, names and roles
  • Explaining the key objectives of the project: simple imagery, bullet points
  • To explain your new product, software or service to the internal teams who will be using it: product images, key instructions, overview of target market
  • Educational or training: basic steps with software screenshots
  • Quick thank you message to a team member, colleague or client: if you think hand-written thank you notes are a bit old-fashioned, how about sending a virtual bunch of flowers in video form?

How To Create A Video With Lumen5

Here’s the Video I Made

In the tutorial video above I made a video from a blog article. Here’s the video that was created so you can see how the end result turned out, and here’s the article that inspired it.

Elizabeth Harrin wearing a pink scarf

Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.