Saturday, April 28, 2018

Thing 37: Green Screen Fun

This Thing was aptly named, for using green screens truly is fun! This year I have been creating video announcements for school using a green screen and DoInk, and there are so many creative things that can be done with them. I explored this Thing to see what else I could add to my repertoire and learned some lessons about green screen work in the process.

Step one, of course, was finding something at home that could substitute for a green screen. I have a sage green sofa in my living room that I thought (erroneously) would fill the bill. I took a video of my cat sleeping on the sofa, planning on transporting him to a tropical beach. Apparently my sofa isn't a deep enough shade of green because the end result was my cat sleeping on a sofa on the beach. I don't know if different lighting in the room would have made a difference. As my true goal was to learn Chatterpix, I decided to forgo experimenting with lighting and pulled out some green construction paper instead. The construction paper worked (after eliminating shadows), and I went on to animate the stuffed animal "understudy" for my now uncooperative cat.

Chatterpix is easy to use. I had one glitch on my first attempt. After drawing the line on the stuffed tiger's mouth and adding the video to DoInk, I could hear the audio, but the tiger wasn't "talking". Somehow the "mouth" ended up in the lower right-hand corner (oops!), but attempt 2 was successful. I am impressed with how well the talking mouth coordinates with the audio.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1liD9LjKUX-854uX1DvdWl0x4sCH-CJxV/view?usp=sharing

The possibilities for using this with my students and in instruction are endless. Also, some students do not have permission to be video recorded, so having an object fill in for them onscreen would solve that problem. I love Nicole Rosen's idea for book talks. Students could also presents reports using Chatterpix. Right now there are rain forest projects displayed in the library...how much fun  it be to have the projects "talk" in a video! I also see myself using Chatterpix with DoInk in lessons as a way to enhance engagement.