Saturday, May 19, 2012

A Look Back At The Film Festival: The Other Stuff

This weekend the fourth and fifth graders are putting on a spectacular performance of Seussical The Musical. It's as talented group of children as I've seen in an Elementary production. I dug up some commercials that weren't featured in the fourth grade film festival series of blogs I wrote in March and April, because I couldn't find a way to fit them in. Partly as a celebration, and partly to talk about some of the tricks that were learned during the unit. All of the commercials here actually feature several members of the cast of Seussical, and Gertrude McFuzz is featured in all three.
The first commercial features an interesting trick. The fourth grade author wrote one of the more unique and quirky commercials I've seen in the years that I've done this. The script required that the protagonist didn't have a head. At first I thought we could do this with an oversized coat in the school's field, but since we were using a green screen, the headless body was achieved by wrapping a green sheet of construction paper around the protagonist's head:





The second commercial proved a challenge for a while. It was supposed to simulate a comic book. In the end, the reader of the comic book would be revealed. I couldn't figure out how to edit it to get a proper "comic book" feel, until I remembered that iMovie '11 actually has the perfect template for this:



The final commercial was again extremely challenging from an editing perspective. It required interactions with the green screen. We used two different Scratch programs for the dog and chicken, but what I really like is the way we figured out how to run into the tent.

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