Dancing Silhouettes

Remember those iTunes + iPod Ads?

I've been wanting to figure out how to do the old iTunes + iPod ads with dancing silhouettes ever since I first saw these images. I found a compliation video on youtube where you can view this ad campaign.
Well, I accidentally stumbled on something within the DoInk Green Screen app that can help make the dancing silhouette. However, I haven't figured out how to add the white iPod and earbuds (yet).

First, I loaded a green screen video into DoInk Green Screen App. I cropped and resized it to make sure only the figure and green screen showed in the viewfinder. Here is what it looked like before I applied the chroma filters.

When you enable the Chroma filter the green disappears by default. I moved the color dial over to red (the complementary color of green) and adjusted the sensitivity level until I found the sweet spot where the figure became a silhouette.

 I exported this clip as a movie to make sure this effect is retained. Here it is below.

Then, I put the video with the new effect back into the Green Screen app and applied the default chroma filter effect which removed the green but kept the black silhouette. I added an image of a color below s that I could see silhouette. 

This is the clip of created from above. The next step is to make decisions about the background and the figure's placement to create your video.

I wanted to try to recreate the iPod/iTunes ad with "iWords" in white over a solid color field. So, I used Phonto to make these three images to play behind my silhouette video. 

Excited to figure out this #videofx using @doinktweets #greenscreen app #k12artchat #artedtech https://t.co/Psp6RMQkNs

— Tricia Fuglestad (@fuglefun) April 2, 2016

Lesson Extensions:

As I was playing with this dancing silhouette effect I found myself wanting to combine them with words and music. A very simple way to achieve this was by using the Ditty App (see this previous post about ditty) to make a musical video from the words I typed. The movie exports as a square. So, I used one of the video layers in the green screen app to add a color so I can scoot the Ditty to one side of the viewing stage. This allowed me to add the dancing silhouettes on the top layer. I played with the sensitivity level until they became semi-transparent so that they can overlap the words without blocking them out.

Here is the video I created over a ditty with two layers of dancing silhouettes. Both layers have some level of transparency so they can overlap the words.  

Related Resources:

I have been doing a graphic design lesson inspired by the iTunes and iPod ads since 2007. I wrote about this lesson for School Arts Magazine and created tutorials for creating these effects for using the Mac Desktop app Keynote and the iPad using Superimpose. View this post.

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Also I've posted a couple lesson ideas using the Ditty app. One was about adding green screen stop motion animation over a ditty.
​See that post here.

The other lesson idea included using drawn or composed animation over a musical ditty. See my post about this here.

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