Thing 37: Green Screen Fun

The Rochester City School District received a grant for technology equipment last year which included a green screen and other recording equipment. I have used the equipment for some basic projects including student videos about famous landmarks, (ex: Flat Stanley going down Niagara Falls in a barrel.) I learned by experimenting without really knowing what I was doing. As with many of the cool tools, I decided to look in to different programs and options to do things right and find additional tools and ideas to work with the green screen.

Also, as always with green screens, I went off in many different directions and learned about many other programs and ideas to use with the green screen idea.

I had the Green Screen app on my IPad and that is what I use to create the images and videos, but I was very interested in the programs that did somewhat the same thing without the actual “green screen”. I had several pictures and videos that I had taken and wanted to wipe out the background. I picked a couple recommended ones from the cool tools discussion including: Lunapic https://www140.lunapic.com/editor/. I had to play with it a lot but I ended up with a student who looked like he was jumping in air (he was actually holding on to a railing on a porch.)

   

A power point presentation by Ann Kozma had a lot of great links and ideas.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14SLO5zCLmTj-kX-oMzjMeDA__lAuYEJfskadlmKhDyo/present?ueb=true&slide=id.p

An example of one of the slides with QR codes for pictures of animals, good websites to search for photos (and information.)

 

I also downloaded chatter pix  and book creator  (web based – on Google Chrome - see below)

I chose both of these with the idea that I can create green screen images and videos and add the green screen videos and images to them. I have been working back and forth on both and they are fun to use for me but the challenge is to have something for the students to use to create. Book creator has come out with a web base program and this was great news. I can now have students play with it and create their own books on PCs without relying on having iPads.

 

There were plenty of ideas of how to use a green screen and I liked one in particular:

Fun Book Cover idea from Nicole Rosen, a Cool Tools workshop participant.

Using a green screen, I had the student pose in the same position as the character in the book cover. I usually took several photographs in slightly different positions. The green screen enables the editor to remove the background easily with one click. Copy the book cover and student image into Word. Once you click on the picture, Format appears on the toolbar. Crop and resize.  Last step is to play with artistic effects and color saturation.