Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)

I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).

The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.

It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.

Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.

This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.

I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).

Link to the document here.

Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.

Myna from Aviary

Aviary has recently released a web based audio editor called Myna and it’s well wrth a look regardless of what area of the curriculum you’re from.

Aviary already has an established web presence with its fantastic suite of image and graphics tools (all named after birds – go see!) and this is a welcome diversion from them. It’s getting to the stage where they are seriously challenging the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Illustrator for the education market.

Anyway; Myna…

Picture a halfway house between Audacity and Garageband, add in that it’s a web tool and so comes with easy options for sharing and embedding and you have Myna. Here’s the demo video…

The interface is intuitive if you have used loop-based audio editors before and is reasonably straightforward for neophytes as well. It certainly looks more engaging than Audacity which, athough a thoroughly excellent tool, isn’t the friendliest-looking thing.

The Garageband-like functions are interesting. You can create pieces of music quickly and easily without much musical know-how using intro’s, loops and endings. The production values on the original clips are high so the results are highly listenable.

You don’t have as much flexibility to mix instruments as Garageband. Essentially, they’ve chopped up ready-made pieces of music and you just reassemble the chunks in the order you want. For most uses that’s as much flexibility as you need.

I did have problems trying to record audio using a mic because I couldn’t get the server to respond when I tried it. It may be to do with being behind a proxy server at work. I used the feedback tool in Myna to flag it up but haven’t received a reply yet. I’ll update the post when I know more.

At the other end, saving and publishing work is a breeze. You save your work as you go then select Mixdown when you’re ready. It gives you an option to save the MP3 or copy the URL and embed code of the finished audio. A lot more painless than getting a class to export an MP3 using Audacity with it’s Lame encoder complications.

The possibilities are huge with this. It’s easy for a class to create podcasts in the classroom or at home, flex their creative muscles and then share what they’ve done. If you have class blog or use a VLE then htis could make homework very interesting indeed.

There’s no cost to set up an Aviary account but a pro subscription is available for $25 a year and there’s education pricing too which isn’t clarified on the website.

See Danny Nicholson’s earlier blog post for another review…

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.

Some of the recommended sites require you to sign up. Always check the terms and conditions. Always read the label. Never feed after midnight and never bring them into contact with water!

Creative Commons is an alternative legal structure from normal copyright rules. Anyone can post creative work on the web in certain places and then specify that people are free to use it with certain provisos.

Have a look at Creativecommons.org for a full explanation and methods of searching for stuff.

Also have a look at these useful sites that allow you to download content. Some may need you to sign up or use a schools broadband connection.

Video
Fourdocs
Pathe
British Film Institute
Teachers’ TV

Music
Audio Network

Sound Effects
Free Sound Project