BEHIND THE SCENES: The making of "They're Coming"

Following the plethora of questions on my Film Club's film They're Coming, I decided to make a short screencast of just how we ran the film club and did the special effects. 
This is a great resource if you are creating a film with a whole class, of any age range. Even the younger children in the club were able to be involved in the decision making every step of the way, while the older tamariki did more of the driving of finding sound effects, special effects and actually using the iMovie programme. 

This screencast includes: 

• Applying special effects
• Applying layers of sound effects 
• Using green/blue screen
• and making people 'disappear' 

If you have any other questions - please be sure to leave a comment. 

Also, if you want to see the film on the big screen again, it is being played during the 2016 Movies in Parks summer season. The film will be shown along with two others from the Manaiakalani Film Festival on Friday March 18th at Point England Reserve - a fantastic whānau evening. 

If you want more info on Storyboarding check my other blogposts. 

Making Mashups

Found a great song, with uplifting and positive lyrics, for children? 
Make a movie mash-up, or even better, get your students to do so themselves. 

Featured here is an example of Will.I.am's Hall of Fame.... 

So... just how did we do this? 
Begin with a template table with two coloumns.
One for each line of the song, the other associated to a image, similar to a storyboard.
If you use the google 'Research' tool to search images. 
Then drag and drop them into the table it creates a footnote with a link to that image. 
Once you have your images, click each footnote and save the images to your desktop. 
Finally, upload the images to your iMovie with the audio and get mashing. 


For Example....

Once getting it into iMovie, add each picture to overlay in time with the audio. We found that most images needed the 'Ken Burns' feature turned off. 

 Ken Burns is a feature when it pans and zooms on an image. Sometimes this is a useful effect, you can change the pan and zoom angle and size in the crop options, or just remove it altogether by choosing 'Fit' instead. 

A huge thanks to Petra Lawrence for her creative input in making when we made this mash-up today. 

Happy Mashing everybody. 

Reflections of a MDTA beginning teacher

This interview is my reflection on the first 6 months of being a teacher and the Manaiakalani Digital Teaching Academy [MDTA] experience.



Process Reflection
As part of our digital teacher education we have been learning how to use iMovie, filming, importing, cutting, editing, cropping, adding sound, smooth transitions and making a (hopefully) seamless production. 
The full interview was 17 minutes of footage. This was trimmed to make four minutes, of which I then had to reduce further to 2 minutes. 
That was the easy part, trimming the footage, the difficult part was making the transitions smooth. I found that by adjusting the zoom, or overlaying footage it reduced the jarring. Finally choosing the appropriate music was really important, it needed to be positive, upbeat, but without being overpowering. As always, constructive or positive feedback is appreciated. 

Film Editing 101

In the past weeks we have been learning to storyboard, shoot, and edit films. 

Some of the key tips I learned were:

• Never cross the line, when filming two characters talking. Instead film from the same side, but different angles. 
• Use a variety of shots. They all have a variety of effects. 
• Unless you are trying to make it cheesy, or it has a specific purpose, avoid the 'fancy' transitions. A simple cut between clips is what most film and tv shows use. 
• When cutting between scenes, it's often less jarring to do so on a movement (see Breaking News 56 seconds in)
• Use background music... it really eases any (bad) editing where it jars a little.

To make this into a reality my team of four collaborated to storyboard the storyline. This as it turns out is a really important part, to plan the scenes and shots you want to get for each before you even begin filming. 

Our team then spent 1hr filming, before individually editing in iMovie to make our own movies. This is my edit... enjoy