It always impresses me how a group of students can work together and collaborate on a storyboard, script, filming sequence and editing decisions. This week at summer Movie Making Camp we had 8 students that ranged in age from 8 - 13. Now most of the time students at these age levels don't even want to be associated with one another, well except for the 8 year old that wants to "play with his older friends all the time." I admit there were certainly some very silent times outside planning, and in the lab where the students went to their respective corner staring into the glare of their single monitor with headphones on. However, without even being pushed into it, since after all it's only summer camp, they came together to film, edit and produce a collaborative movie.
Hollywood won't be knocking on our doors any time soon, but we certainly learned a lot about the capabilities of iMovie '11 and how to use green screen and picture-in-a-picture techniques. It also taught us to better plan and to think about costumes when using these techniques in the future. Both boys in one scene wore blue outfits and we really wanted to use a blue screen to make the art work come to life since the green screen was used for the backdrop. We had to problem solve and used picture-in-a-picture as a special effect instead. Not as polished as our 12 year old chief editor Abbi would say, but it will do for the time we have here. She was right! It will have to do for the time we had this one week to plan, film and produce our movie, The Legend of Slappy Hooper an American Tall Tale by Aaron Shepard.
Could you do the same thing using Movie Maker? Or is there another alternative to iMovie? Some things are easier using a Mac.
ReplyDeleteYou certainly could G. Robb. I have used Movie Maker along time ago. I'm not sure about it's green/blue screen effects though. In my old district we used Pinnacle Studio for editing movies on Windows machines, and we were pretty happy with all of the effects that it had embedded.
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