I’m a Green Screen Machine!

First of all….OMG I got a new green screen!!! It came in last week and we are LOVING it! I reorganized my “office” – as if I have time to be in office, what a joke! – and transformed it into a filming studio. Check it out:

Pretty sweet, huh? And those big black cases are full of cameras! We have sets of both digital cameras (with video feature) AND a new set of Flip cameras, which rock my socks. Plus we have tripods and all that good stuff that makes life easier. Yes, I know how lucky I am.

I also know how lucky I am to work with such great teachers. They know that nothing makes me happier than having them come by and want to work with me to plan some awesome tech project with their classes. I had the chance to show a quick little example of how the green screen works at our faculty meeting last week, and now the ideas are flowing freely.

The reason that I decided to buy the green screen was for my 7th grade ELA’s poetry projects. Last week, they spent a good bit of time in the library researching a poet. They used the information gathered from their research and from analyzing their poets work to create a Fakebook page for their poet. This “Fakebook” is the best I’ve seen, and I learned about it on Kelly Tenkely’s AWESOME blog.

The next phase of their project was to create a music video relating to poetry concepts or the poet they chose to research. Enter the Mighty Little Librarian — green screen machine! Each group came to the library, did a little practicing, then we recorded their music video in our new “studio”! The following day, the whole class came in to the library computer lab to do their editing. I introduced the students to JayCut to use the chroma key effects. They did such a great job! You can check out my two favorite videos here. I did do some touching up in iMovie since these are the ones I decided to share…I just couldn’t help myself. Isn’t it great?? I could watch this over and over and still laugh every time. This is why middle schoolers are the best.

I put my favorites in the Friday video today, and now everyone wants to use the green screen! We are going to have some fun projects throughout the rest of this year!

2 thoughts on “I’m a Green Screen Machine!

  1. I too am a green screen machine. I love to do chroma-key on my mac using Wirecast. We used this to do morning announcements for the school.

    We had a nice studio setup, but the green screen was expensive and blue on the other side, cost us 250.

  2. Finally did my first green screen vid today. It was a trial so I could teach the students and a few teachers that want to use it for a project. I layered my helpers talking about green screen over three Discovery Ed videos of pyramids, the Earth’s core and a shark attack. It was so fun. And pretty easy. Now just trying to figure out how to get the video off Jaycut.

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