Image - Mr Ush on Flickr

I’m not going to BETT this year. My work is already funding my MSc so a I don’t feel I can ask Keith to fund a trip to Olympia, especialy given I have no pressing need to go.

I’m a little sorry as it’s only in the last year that I’ve started to follow the ed-tech community through Twitter and there seems to be a lot more interesting stuff round the fringes. Follow the #BETT2010 tag to explore some more.

I’ve rashly suggested that people could play a Twitter version of Tag while they are at Olympia but didn’t think what the rules could be.

Here’s my suggestion…

• It’s Tag in reverse. The idea is that players actively try to get caught as an excuse to meet other Twitter users in the education technology network.
• I’ve suggested that @dughall is it but as BETT happens over a number of days the first person that day to get to stand D10 (next to the Grand Entrance)and announces it on Twitter using the #tagbett hashtag. People who are “IT” have to tweet where they are every time they change location (stand, seminar, event, cafe etc) or every 10 mins or so until “found”.
• People following #tagbett then have to get to get to the location and find “IT”. When “IT” changes person both people have to confirm that they are now (or are no longer) IT.

Is that too massively complicated? Please comment and I’ll refine the rules…

the blog is still not updated properly so this isn’t anything like the finished redesign. Aaron has a tummy bug (bless him), hence the delay.

Keep checking back.

In a few weeks we’ll be launching a new design and moving host so everything will look a little more sexy, run quicker and let us do a few more fun things.

We only starting to use this technology at our place about 18 months ago even though the it has been around for a bit mainly due to issues about pedagogy and our own levels of confidence. It is, however a really useful and fun thing to use in teaching and learning. Seeing people students have filmed magically transported to far away times or places creates a real “ooh” moment and can enhance teaching about storytelling methods or appreciation of place or period.

This is a piece we put together with one of our partner schools to help them introduce Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Y10′s. The actor is the school’s head of drama and the images are all Flickr Creative Commons. The sound effects came from the Freesound Project and the music from the Audio Network Library (schools’ license).

Frankenstein Introduction from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.

Tips for getting a good “key”

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert and our first forays into it were pure excrement. The following is what I learnt from making mistakes and advice from other, wiser types.

Use green or blue as your background.
The reason these 2 colours are used is mainly because it is furthest away from natural skin tones (unless you are hungover!). This way, when you remove the green, say, from the clip you don’t make your face transparent. It is possible to key out any colour, though. Just make sure that the object you are filming isn’t the same colour as the back. I’ve been told also that green screen works best for people with dark hair and blue screen for blond but I’ve never had problems with either.

You don’t need to spend thousands on professional equipment.
The best results I have had for doing chromakey work were filmed against a wall we had recently painted a lurid green (see pic).

Green screen painted wall

So long as the surface you are filming against is smooth and uniformly coloured and lit you can get away with most things. If you are using fabric, make sure that it is kept in a way that minimizes creases. Hoover it occasionally and I never let students on it with their shoes on!

Find out how to set the white balance on the camera.
You may have noticed when using digital movie cameras that if you change from filming in natural light to indoors light the hue changes slightly. This is the automatic white balance kicking in. Briefly, white light comes in different “temperatures” depending on the lighht source. Ever noticed that old-style light bulbs seem to give a warner glow than their energy saving brethren? There you go. The camera guesses the type of light it’s filming in and tries to compensate to keep all the colours looking natural, only sometimes it doesn’t quite work. Setting the WB manually tells the camera what white actually looks like so it can adjust the colours properly. How to do it? Once you have set up the screen and the camera and sorted your lighting get someone to hold a clean piece of white paper on the spot they will stand when being filmed. Zoom the camera right in so all you see is the white page. Now set the manual WB. You may notice a distinct change in the colours when you zoom out.

It’s important to do this so that green or blue are truly that colour on the clip. Otherwise you may have problems with the keying later.

Lighting – You can get away with rudimentary lighting so long as you obey a few rules:

• The backdrop needs to be evenly lit. If one bit is brighter that another then it won’t key out evenly and you’ll be left with fuzzy bits on the screen in the wrong place (called “Artefacts” apparently)
• Get as much natural light as you can. I once set up a screen facing a huge glass wall in a gym and that seemed to get good results (despite lousy audio)
• If you can get a light to shine on the actors from behind. This helps to outline then well against the backdrop and makes the shot look more professional.That’s all we did for the embedded example.
• Make sure the actors stand at least 2 feet from the screen to avoid shadows on the backdrop. Shadows make keying really tricky as your screen in no longer evenly lit. Also, remove any reflecting jewellry, glasses, props. If they reflect the bacground colour they’ll go transparent.

Clothing.
Obviously, avoid wearing the same colour as the background unless you want to look like a floating head. I’ve also found that wearing black or white is a problem for some software as it goes a little transparent.

Movement
The easiest way to act against green screen is to not move at all. If you watch the clip above we use the positioning of the camera to create a bit of dynamism in the footage. Walking on and off the shot always look rubbish as it’s all done in profile and nobody’s face looks good in profile apart from Liv Tyler. When your students are storyboarding they need to think cinematically, not theatrically. In other words, think how it will look on the screen, not how it looks then and there in the room.

Film in a quite place with as little echo as you can manage.
Audio is one of the bits which a lot of people forget about but can make real a difference to the outcome. Imagine footage which looks like someone is walking in a forest but sounds like they’re in a toilet. You can always add reverb an’ that later.

Use decent software.
It’s worth spending a bit of cash on software if you are going to do it seriously. I’ve already stated a preference for Adobe Premiere Elements as you get the same level of control as you do for their pro editing software (just about). We’ve used Ulead’s Videostudio 10 before which gives you results really quickly but not reliably. iMovie and Moviemaker can manage it but require extra downloads (imovie and moviemaker) and the results aren’t that great.

To make the editing job easier try to crop the clip so that all your are left with is a small area round the actor.
This means you only have to worry about keying out the area immediately round the actor. Watch though that they don’t move out of the cropped area or they will look like they are disappearing into thin air.

Setting the key
Some editors have an eye dropper tool which let you click on the image of the clip to tell it what colour to remove. For best results, follow the tip above about cropping then click on an area near the actor. Make sure you play around with the “similarity” settings. Basically, the lower the similarity the narrower the variation of pixels that go transparent. Conversely, if you set it way high all pixels will become see through and noby wants that, do they?

And finally – don’t worry about it!
You’re not George Lucas so nobody will care if it’s all slightly squiffy and looks like dodgy 70′s Dr Who. The experience of the process is often enough for kids to get excited about. I spend quite a long time getting things just right but that’s because I’m anal, it doesn’t make me a better person to talk to in the pub.

Just thought I’d mention that Chris – the main blogger on ElectricChalk will be at Bett from today, so there won’t be any posts until Monday.

Expect some new news or ideas from him when he gets back. (Also, maybe, keep an eye on our twitter bar on the right in case he leaves some messages)

So, are any of you going to/have been to Bett this year?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the world’s largest educational technology event…Cheers.

Tom Gardiner at Birley Community College in Sheffield finished this project this week. It’s part of a wider module on character archetypes and comparing Batman Begins with the 1960′s Batman movie. For this exercise a group of Y9′s storyboarded a trailer about a superhero character they had developed. With our help they Photoshopped themselves into various environments and then put the movies in a photostory with a soundtrack of their choice. 

It was an interesting group being all boys and being neither high or low achievers they rarely get a chance to do special activities. We did it over 2 stages, the first at the school taking the pictures and the second at our City Learning Centre completing the Photoshopping and then putting the photostory together using Logotron’s Revelation Sight and Sound. As a side note, their behaviour  was excellent despite being locked into one activity for a whole school day.

This is the example we used as inspiration to get the students thinking about what they could achieve technically. (I did it – I don’t mind if you think it’s crap!)

This is the work of 2 groups.

 I really wish there was a film called “I, Penguin”. Genius!

I think the real effectiveness of this project came not from the use of IT but because of the choice of group by Tom and the focus on the preparation and writing that happened before any student got near a computer or camera.

NOTE: All the images (apart from the students’ own) come from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I meant to give credit for them but neglected to keep the URL’s. My apologies to the owners. If the images are yours and you would like credit please leave a comment and I will amend the post.

The music was taken from the Audio Network Production Library (on schools’ broadband package.

Had a comment from Dan Livingstone at the Learning Games blog (go there now, it’s good!) helpfully directing me to Derek Robertson’s Consolarium pages at Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Cheers Dan.

The default position should be to ask if you can get by with Windows Moviemaker (WMM) which comes free with XP and Vista. (If you are lucky enough to have Macs then you have the joys of iMovie to look forward to – a much better option and I bear you no ill will). Be careful though. We had a situation where we helped one of our schools buy some SD card video cameras only find that XP Moviemaker throws a hissy fit if you try and import the MPEGs off the card. Really MMW is only good for sequencing clips and adding rudimentary text and audio.

If you want to do something a bit more adventurous though you’ll need to bother the bursar for some cash. By adventurous I mean things like chroma key work, proper visual effects and proper sound editing (much overlooked in media work.)

There are 4 main options open to you if you want to keep your costs south of £200 a license:

• Sony Vegas
• Pinnacle Studio
• Ulead VideoStudio
• Adobe Premiere Elements

I’ll come right out and say I’d recommend Adobe any time but actually any will do the job. The functions are pretty similar so it’s just a question of interface and user-friendliness.

I’ll also be honest and say I loathe Sony. They make expensive and over-designed baubles and a bit like Apple they kind of demand you commit to a Sony world if you buy their stuff. At least Apple make it fun. The Vegas software is popular, feature-rich and I know that some people absolutely swear by it but it is too idiosyncratic for my liking. You want things to fall under your mouse when editing. It requires so much patience anyway that what you don’t want is to search for things that have been put in counter-intuitive places and given funny names.

Pinnacle is the probably the biggest seller and comes from the people that make the professional Avid software which is world-class. However, both Pinnacle and it’s clone Ulead Video Studio are aimed squarely at home-consumers who, let’s face it, mostly aren’t bothered about doing cutaways, green screening or colour grading. The 2 suites can do it but I suspect the functions are there just to make it look good on the specification sheet. They are just too darn tricky to use. I was doing a project with a drama teacher last year using green screening on Videostudio 10 to create effective dream sequences and not having full editing function on the overlay track was such a nightmare I wanted to stab myself in the face! (Note to self: Have just re-read that sentence and realised it makes me sound like an over-opinionated geek, oh well…). Both interfaces look friendly enough but, like Sony Vegas, when you start to get more creative things get complicated and frustrating, not good if you have a bunch of rebellious Year 10′s in your classroom. If you choose Pinnacle make sure you get the right package – the basic one can’t do green screening for example.

Adobe Premiere Elements is a stripped down version of their excellent Premiere Pro offering and at first look it can seem dark and intimidating. The main benefits are that organising clips is much more straightforward (try making and searching folders in Ulead) and you can have as many video tracks as you like and they all edit the same way. This might seem trivial but one of the learning objectives in the OCR iMedia qualification is the ability to arrange and name clips which I tried doing in Ulead and it wasn’t a nice experience. Adobe’s organiser is more like Windows Explorer therefore much more intuitive. Also, you can archive whole projects which makes backing up a classes work over a network possible in a couple of clicks.

If your students are going on to do film or media at college or uni, the Adobe package will give them a much better start in the world of non-linear editing as it has more in common with the high end systems they will come across.

There’s more reasons to love it but this is ablog post, not a thesis.

Whatever you choose, do 2 things:

• Download an evaluation version and test it first. Tricky with Pinnacle as they don’t let you.
• Shop around with Educational suppliers. We got Adobe’s Premiere and Photoshop Elements bundle for £25 a user from our supplier.

Got that? Good.