Using Green Screen For Making Videos

Here is my next installment about making  videos in art class. This time I  be  telling you about my attempt at using Green Screen (along with iMotion) with some 5th grade students.
Believe me when I tell you,  I'm not one of those tech savvy teachers who easily breezes along doing fabulous projects using the newest technology. You could easily say, um... I'm on a learning curve here. While making this video, I was learning along with the students. Sometimes, that's the way you gotta do it. And again, I'll be relaying what worked and what I would have done differently in this process.

Before you read this though, here's one FYI. I was lucky enough to pull out a small group of students to work on this video assignment. It would be very difficult to do a lesson like this with one iPad and 25 students in a class.

As with the previous video, the kids started out by creating the story. My only requirement was that the story revolve around kindness and a kind deed, in some way.
The kids settled on a story about some space travelers landing on Jupiter. After they land, the space ship breaks apart. Luckily, a kind alien appears and it offers to help them out. After the alien fixes the space ship, they say goodbye. The space travelers then return to the space ship and take off to continue on their journey.
We had the story all sketch out on a story board before we started filming. The storyboard helps keep the kids on track and know what we're working towards when filming.

The characters

After the story was done, it was time to create the characters. The kids created a walrus, panda bear, narwhal and the alien using Plasticine clay. We used Plasticine so the characters could easily move parts of their bodies during the filming. 
Then it was onto creating the space ship. We collected a bunch of small boxes, decorated them with construction paper and attached them all together. The Kleenex box we used worked great! It had an opening we used for the character to enter and exit the space ship.

Putting together the space ship

To use Green Screen you need to have a green background when you start filming. I decided to switch it up from the last time. So I decided to buy a tri-fold board. The kind that is used for science fair presentation. We covered it  all up with green construction paper. This worked much better then the cardboard box we used for the last video.

The finished space ship with the characters 

The first scene to be filmed was the space ship floating in space. We attached green string to the space ship and suspended it in front of the green tri-fold and. For this film we manually took pictures with iMotion as the space ship slowly descended. We also tied the green string to the alien when you see it flying in the video.

Here are a few scenes from when we were filming.

The alien arrives

The space ship breaks apart

The space ship catches fire

Take a look and see what the video looks like before we used the DoInk Green Screen app. You'll see the green construction paper background and the characters interacting in front of it.

So here it is: The Kindness of Aliens   This is the first of two post about using Green Screen. In my next post I'll tell you all about what went on when we started using DoInk Green Screen to add backgrounds to this video.

If you want to read about my first attempted with making an iMotion video in art class, you can check it out here. 
What do you think about this project? Have you ever made videos in art class. I'd love to hear about it. You can comment below.