Course+Organization

To help the students work through the steps that I would like them to (as found in Pedagogy) I would suggest you have your students work through the projects as follows. If you have students who are interested/have ideas and are ready to go I have also separated out the individual pieces of technical knowledge that the students might need to know as they are producing videos. You might want to introduce Project 3 and 4 a little bit earlier in the course, as they can be constructed as individual projects. From my experience there has been quite a few days wasted by students who had group members who did not come to school that day for various reasons. Also the sets of tutorials are based around the Adobe CS5 collection, which is available from www.adobe.com as a 30 day trial or as a large purchase.

Project 1 - Newscasts The reason why I suggest this project first is that this takes care of most of the introductory skill that students should know to make videos. The requirements are a script and some footage of someone sitting at a desk. Working through these tutorials the students will be able to produce something that they can be proud of and show at home. This should get students interested in the basics of the course and help to show them that they need to plan thing or else they will not be as successful as they want to be.

Project 2 - Standing Beside Explosions This project a great introduction into special effects. It will allow students to see the basics of keying which is the lead up to using a green screen to replace the background to something else. For footage you can download free clips from [|www.detonationfilms.com] which are great for the basics. For my school I will be purchasing some of the HD clips so we have some stock footage that the students can use with out worrying about copyright issues.

Project 3 - Make a Public Service Announcement or Advertisement for a school function. While this isn't explicitly documented on this wiki (yet) the students should make a 30 second advertisement about something happening at the school. If you talk to your SLC/SRC person they are usually excited for the help and will allow you to have enough projects for the class to create. When possible either have teachers display the videos on their computers/projectors or on the school website itself. This helps build in the external piece of the students wanting to work through the class. The project also allows for a little bit more personal expression so they can also feel motivated by having some creative control.

Project 4 - Moving Things on the Screen This is the first time that students will have a chance to work with key frames in Adobe After Effects. The concept of a key frame allows the students to do basic animation with out having to draw or move everything a little bit at a time. The program will fill in the places you tell it to. If you have access to Photoshop to make the effects work really well you should have students erase the background out of the images you are working with and make sure the images are placed on a transparent background. This project allows students to look at the concept of Layers in more detail along with show them some powerful tools (key frames).

Project 5 - Jazz Hands (Will be updated soon) This project is the first time that students will be working with the Puppet tool. This allows the students to take still images and animate them as if they had paper dolls to pose in different positions. The process of making the animation is not hard, however having the students cut themselves out of a Photoshop file and place themselves onto a transparent background is sometimes a frustrating process for everyone involved. You should either have a stand in file they can use or be willing to help them out. The other suggestion that I have for you is that you should have an example project done for them so they can have something to work towards.

Project 6 - Rotoscoping - A Round of Applause This is the most technically challenging project that I currently have posted on the wiki. This can be a drawn out process if you let it be. My number one suggestion about this is that if you can use a green screen and keying it is a better option than this. At the very least make sure that your subject is not a similar color to your background. When I initially did this it was a problem. This is a pretty cool effect when done properly and hopefully the students will enjoy it.

These are my six suggestions for projects, in amongst these you should consider having the students make 30s, 2 minute, 5 minute and up to 10 minute videos so they can refine their techniques doing something that they came up with themselves. The five project pages that I am including thus far will get them on their way to creating something magnificent.