Fun with Chromakey Suits!

Chromakey technology allows film makers to create special effects in the post production stage, such as generating the illusion of invisibility and applying imagery to the green areas. This is achieved by compositing/layering images or videos together. 

Students in the LRC have made good use of  this technology over the years by filming in front of blue screens and green screens and editing their footage on iMovie.

This year the decision was made to  take things a step further. We were very excited by the arrival of our special green screen gloves and body suits last week. The students had a great time trying them out and creating some very special effects. Here are a few fun pictures from the set.

Here is a short video which explains how to do this.

Wevideo, An Alternative Video Editor

We have been playing around with a web based alternative to Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. The application is called Wevideo. It is powerful, versatile and free.  This program will not do chroma key work yet and doesn't allow you to split clips, but apart from that it is a very complete toolset for video production work.

We just have begun using it with our students for video work that can't be done in our Mac Lab, due to booking issues. It will be presented to 7th grade Humanities students as one of several options for tools they can use  when producing their slave diary projects this fall.

  If you haven't tried Wevideo yet, you should. Here is a brief tutorial on how to use this free, online application for movie making.

Wevideo is available in the Google Chrome App Store,

8th Grade Book Trailers

The 8th Grade created video book trailers on a book of their choices which they planned and produced in groups. This was a 6 week process involving 18 lessons of ICT. The 8th grade students are already quite skilled at video production, so this was an opportunity for them to branch out a bit and take on a video genre they were unfamiliar with. In preparing for the project, students learned about shots, angles and camera movement. They learned that trailers are generally fast paced,short in duration and involve a variety of shots and angles as well as scene changes. Through the project the 8th grade students were able to fine tune their video editing skills as well as try out a great many new techniques incorporating special effects and using the green screen. These trailers can be found on the LRC YouTube Channel as well as on this page. We hope you enjoy them!