Our school has purchased a green screen and some lights. The idea is to film students more, encourage them to slip into different roles, be more visuals, ans add more effects to the final product. We want to emphasize the skills of speaking, appropriate and constructive video content.

Some examples that we are planning to record:

• Fifth graders wil be recording their presidential candidate speeches.
• Third graders had the idea of becoming different frogs from around the world, reporting on their disappearing species in honor of “The Year of the Frog”.
• Kindergarteners will be reporting from different parts of the country of Brazil that they are studying.

So, now that we had the green screen and the lights set up… Now what… We are a PC school with no special video editing software. All we have is a Flip Camera and Windows Movie Maker.

We recorded a few clips on the Flip with various positions of the lights, then downloaded and imported the clips into Windows Movie Maker.

I googled “green screen windows movie maker” and came upon several tutorials on how to create your own “Green Screen Transition”. The solutions were to copy and paste code into Notepad, then save them as an .xml files under a folder I needed to create under Movie Maker, ex. Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX  After I reopened MovieMaker a new transition appeared appeared under “Transitions”. I was just supposed to drag the transition between the background image I had chosen and the movie with the green screen. Well…. it did not want to work. I continued to google and scan different tutorials until I found a different code for a “non-red key type”

Try the Non-Red key type chorma for more wide range of key colors:

<TransitionsAndEffects Version=”1.0″>
<Transitions>
<TransitionDLL guid=”{C5B19592-145E-11D3-9F04-006008039E37}” >
<Transition name=”Non-Red chroma key” iconid=”11″>
<Param name=”KeyType” value=”1” />
</Transition>
</TransitionDLL>
</Transitions>
</TransitionsAndEffects>

As usual copy paste the xml code into notepad and use File->Save As to save as nonred.xml extension in folder C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX. Create the AddOnTFX folder if necessary.

That one seemed to do the trick. The green screen was replaced by the background image. We are working on iron out some kinks, such as darker colored pants and other body parts disappearing on the screen and playing more with the lights, but the results are decent (far from profressional), I know that the kids will get a kick out of seeing themselves transported to a different location.

I have left the practice clip at school and will upload the example on Monday to give you a better idea of what we were playing with.

Posted: 25. October, 2008 at 7:41 am. Filed under: Digital Storytelling, Elementary School.
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