PE1: Imovie

I am excited to apply what I have learned from watching the Lynda.com Imovie training. Here's my certificate to add to my portfolio. I am super excited about this!


In order to learn about Imovie, we need some practical experience to apply learning. I've decided to launch a media campaign at the college. My colleague and I discussed today that we could create a tagline for the video series and call it "I am SKC."  SKC stands for Salish Kootenai College. I got a fantastic idea while talking to my students about this. One of my students is attending classes with his three children. And he is trying to get his wife to enroll too. What a family affair! I asked him if I could start interviewing him tomorrow and it's a go.


Another advantage of learning Imovie thoroughly is that I can teach my new skills to my students. One area that I would like to develop more is the green screen technology. I didn't realize that you could just paint a wall in your office green. Any green works, as long as it is saturated. Here's some pointers I learned about the green screen. 

Pointer #1. The green screen doesn't fade in, so you have to align both videos - the one of the person and the one of the background together. Here's the two videos. Move them into the working area and place the green screen on top of the trees. 


Pointer #2. In order for the masking to be believable, make sure your lighting source is consistent in both videos. Additionally, make sure your camera angles are consistent. For example, if your subject is at eye level, make sure your trees or background is at eye level. 


Pointer #3. Leave some green at the end of your recording. This way Imovie can make sure to capture the full green color and then you can subtract the last frame. I think this has been one of the important things that I have learned when making videos for editing later. Leave some space before and after for editing. This is important stuff!

Pointer #4. You can manually crop objects that you wish to not have in the video. In the example below, the instructor used the crop tool to crop some equipment. Just be careful that if the subject exits the stage, that he doesn't just disappear into cyberspace. 

Well that's it for today. Can't wait to go shoot and edit.