History video challenge for the students

Hello everyone!

Today I want to tell you more about our collaborative e-project. Do you remember my post about the Infographic we created for a CLIL History project? If not you can read it here. Day to day we are creating new things so this is the reason of this post.

Related with this, we decided to create a new challenge for our children through a video. As you now, when you want to record a video it is really to plan everything in advance. An easy way to do it is by storyboarding your video, which means planning every scene to have it ready for the recording moment. We have used Story Board That to create this amazing outline. As you can see, we have included the characters, the backgrounds (we will use a croma when recording to add them by video editing) and everything we were going to say.

Story Board That is easy to use and you can create 6 scenes for free where you can add characters, bakgrounds and edit them with a great variety of designs.


Made with Storyboard That

Having made this outline, we were ready to record our video. As you can see we planned to disguise as different people in different times in History, So there we went.

It was really funny and few time consuming because we have planned everything in advance. Recording was easy and we spend like an hour or so to do it (thanks to the storyboard planning) but we had been suffering a lot of problems when editing. 

At the very beggining, we tried Sony Vegas but it doesn't work in my computer, so I decided to download a free trial version of Adobe Premier cc, which is a profesional video editor and this means difficult to use. We have to saw many tutorials till we find out how to use it and how to apply a croma effect. Then, we discovered that the light in the videos recorded was not uniform so neither the green color on the croma key. This can give you a lot of problems when you are editing because you need the green color to be uniform and with now shadows.  

In that point we thought that we would have to record the videos again with a better light and being more careful. Of course, this has occurred because we are not experts and it was the first time we used a croma and also the video editor. 

Then, I tried to find a solution in order to not record again and I find a color effect which eliminates all the green color in the video and mantains red and blue. This worked because it eliminated all the green background, but it also eliminated the green in our faces. Nevertheless we decided to leave it like that because it was not a big problem. So if you are going to use a croma in your videos, take into account these aspects. 

Then, with the video finished, we used iMovie to add music and some effects easily.

However, despite it was difficult to edit the video, we had a great time recording it and it was a really good group experience. 

Here you have our video in which we explain a new challenge to our children. They will have to create a comic about a history period of time. So, if you see us a litlle orange it was because of our mistake using the croma haha. 

* We have included the Bloopers and Outtakes just for fun, but maybe for children we will leave it without them.






Moreover, this has been part of The ESL Times project. If you want to participate like us or just to know more about it click here.

Hope you like it!