Tricia Fuglestad's Blog

Try Your Best Growth Mindset Fugleflick

2/14/2018

Fifth Grade Fugleflick Filmmakers spent 2 months creating a story to an original song to encourage everyone to shift their thinking from can't to can. Change that little voice in your head from fixed thinking to a growth mindset and TRY YOUR BEST!

Try Your Best (full version) from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Special FXs Explained:

This movie is full of special effects made with drawn animation and/or green screen. Students used relative size to become the small voice in your head saying positive things to encourage you to TRY YOUR BEST. Here are some of the FX students used.

This little sprite popped onto the TV screen to encourage a student making art. He first had to be layered onto a screenshot of an iPad. Then the artist had to be filmed looking at a TV with the color green on it's screen. The two were layered in the GS app by Do Ink.

Some of the effects students used in this movie have been done before in previous Fugleflicks or projects. The thought bubble trick is explained in this post.

This effect is a straight forward use of relative size to make the sprites look very small. See this post about relative size for a tutorial and more ideas for using this trick.

I'm so excited to see the silhouette special FX in this Fugleflick. This idea has its own post explaining how we found this trick on accident and some of the amazing ideas you can use it for.

For one scene, a student is drawing and gets frustrated. She slams down her marker and gives up. As the art heads to the garbage can, the portrait on it speaks out to its artist begging for her to not give up. This special FX was create after a series of steps as show in the video. The animation was created through rotoscope. See this post to learn more.

This effect where a student spins into a painting with a quick size change was so amazing that it received it's own blog post here.

To make these little sprites fly, we had them pose in the last moment of their video. Then we used a still image of the last frame of the video and made them fly using the keynote app. To enhance the magic, we used a pixie title effect without words (just typed a space) to create a trail of sprite dust as they fly off the screen.

Want to learn the song?

#GSVFF Entry

Students wanted to tell the story of a fixed mindset changing to a growth mindset with the encouragement of positive little voices to combat the negative little voices you hear in your own head. Many students need this message so the filmmakers tried to get in their shoes (and heads) to help others Try their Best.

Since this video fits the theme "In Another's Shoes" we trimmed it down to 2 minutes so it could qualify for the first annual Global Student Voice Film Festival. To take a 3 min 40 sec song down to 2 minutes wasn't easy. The best way was to trim each chorus and remove the bridge. We were allowed another 1 minute of credits. I think it still tells the story just as well though some awesome scenes were removed in this version.

Try Your Best (2 min version) from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Public Screenings of Try Your Best

Try Your Best has been selected for a public screening in the Screen Test Jr Film Festival in Schaumburg on Saturday, April 21st alongside films from Arizona, Texas, Sweden, and Canada. Those who could not attend will skype in to talk about their films.

Photo of screening from last year's Fugleflick, Don't Crush My Dreams

Thursday, May 3, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm the Arlington Heights Memorial Library will kick off the School District 25 month-long art show with an arts reception. The evening will feature more than 300 works of art from students at District 25 schools, kindergarten through eighth grade, and live music from the South Middle School Jazz Ensemble. Refreshments will be served. There will be a continuous screening of TRY YOUR BEST in the technology room off the Marketplace area.

ScreenTest Jr.

Our Fugleflick Filmmakers' movie, Try Your Best was accepted into the 2018 Screen Test Film Fest Jr. Of the 5 movies screening, ours was the only one local. The other films were from Texas, Arizona, Canada, and Sweden. The hand drawn animation from an 8th grader in Arizona won best of show. See the list of films here.

Just returned from watching #TryYourBest on the big screen at @screen_test Where my #fugleflick filmmakers were celebrated for their amazing #growthmindset movie
Watch it here: https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 #drydenrocks #d25itspersonal #STEAM #studentvoice #edtech @DoInkTweets pic.twitter.com/n46a6oznta
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

Loved how @screen_test had students discuss their movie-making process with the audience. Here are the #fugleflick filmmakers talking about loving #greenscreen FXs for storytelling: #greenscreenbookslowchat #STEAM #edtech #drydenrocks #tlap @doinktweets https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 pic.twitter.com/2U2AcoBKw7
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

They also had a chance to explain the role that our storyboard played in making the #fugleflick #TryYourBest #drydenrocks #STEAM pic.twitter.com/DMn6EFOLEh
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

Love that they remembered to mention the audience they created the story for...All the students who need encouragement--> This is for you #TryYourBest https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 pic.twitter.com/f9lrCiRc6X
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

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Green Screen FX: Spin into Art

2/9/2018

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My Fugleflick filmmakers created this effect for their upcoming movie. It was intended to look like the artist was painting The Scream, by Edvard Munch, then becoming the subject of the painting with his own body. There were a bunch of steps to making this illusion. Let's see if we can spell them out below.

Empty canvas on easel

The Scream painting with masked out subject

Actor paints and becomes The Scream

Animation was timed to green screen. Layered images in Keynote and set a slow "wipe" build in for the painting image

Layered the GS footage and animation in GS app by Do Ink. Trimmed the GS video at the spin. Pasted it & resized it to play out the rest of the clip with the actor in the painting.

This trick doesn't have to be so tricky...

Still image prepared in Keynote where a piece of art looks like it rests on an easel

Green screen video includes a SPIN

Layer the GS video over the still image. I use the SPIN as the point of jumping into the artwork. I copied the video and trimmed it at the spin. Resized the second piece and placed it in the painting

The dancer joins the artwork when she magically SPINS into it.

Spin into the art and Jump back out

Falling Out of a Painting

You can add the "magic" if you need to...

Girls spin (slowly) with GS

Still image of Mondrian's art on Easel

The girls spun too slowly to convince the viewer that "magic" put them in the painting. So I used iMovie to isolate the spin and sped it up

There was no SPIN so I used the jump for the moment of "magic". It wasn't convincing, so I put it in iMovie and added a ripple transition to help make it more magical.

Watch the Fugleflick "TRY YOUR BEST"

Try Your Best is the student made movie that inspired this video effect.

Try Your Best (full version) from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

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Swapping Animations and other tricks

1/24/2018

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The Do Ink Animation app allows you to save files in their original format, export animations as movies, or create stills from the movies. If you save them in the original format you can only view them by pulling the file into the app. But this also means you can SWAP your animations from one iPad to another so you can layer effects or try this cool trick. What you're seeing below is one animation shared out with two other iPads. I change the animation path on each one and set the timing to make it look like the sprite is flying from one screen to the next.

Click me to download the Data DoInk File

Make an animation. Mine was like this.
Use the share button to save as Data (DOINK) You can practice using my sprite file here
Copy it to the Dropbox (or Google Drive)
Open Dropbox on a different iPad
Find the file, choose "...", choose EXPORT
Choose "Open in..."
Select Copy to Animation App (Do Ink)
I did this in a third iPad as well.
My animation was playing over a color background. So I made a still image of the color and used it to help fill up my time so the screen will look blank while it waits for the other iPad to play the animation.
iPad 1: The first 3 seconds were my animation then I used my blank color image to fill up 6 more seconds. My movie was a total of 9 seconds long.
iPad 2: I used my blank color image for the first 3 seconds, my animation ran for the next 3 seconds, and my color blank filled the last 3 seconds. My total animation was 9 seconds.
iPad 3: I used my blank color image for the first 6 seconds and my animation filled the last 3 seconds for a total of 9 second movie.
Then, I asked for help and we hit play on all three iPads at the exact same time.

Swap for storytelling and collaborations

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Custom Holograms

10/25/2017

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Haunted Hologram made with Do Ink Animation and Drawing app

Click to download the Spooky Hologram Lesson

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Collaborative Dance Video

6/5/2017

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Layered green screen video over background made in Kaleido Free app

Students danced or moved for 2 seconds

They saved a video of their Kaleido free radial design

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Fuglefun ways to use Green Screen

2/11/2016

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Three layers: white image, video before green screen, thought bubble

Fugleflick filmmakers are currently working on a movie about movement in art. As they worked on the storyboard they decided to create a movie that had many special effects. For example they said they wanted a thought bubble to appear over video with video inside it with white in the background of the bubble. When we looked at the Green Screen app by DoInk we found it could do everything we needed to create the effect.

Thought bubble drawn in DoInk Animation App. We made it green inside the bubble to reveal video layer below. We sandwiched the video between the bubble and white layer to make a clean cut off of the legs

The green in the bubble goes away with the chroma filter. Now you see the white from the lowest layer. The white around the bubble is masked out with "magic wand" tool so that it can look as if it floats.

We exported the thought bubble video to the camera roll. Then we could add it back in over the other video, resize, crop, mask, and line it up in the time line.

We were able to film this student's full body even though our screen wasn't big enough on the sides for full coverage since we could crop the edges out in the GS app

We layered the GS video over the regular video. The app takes away the green. We can then resize and place the video as if she were small and standing on her hand

We used the GS app for post production effects so students had to imagine and understand what the results would look like as they acted their parts during filming

This animation was made by importing the video into a DoInk animation app, following the movement of their hands with lines from frame to frame, then matching up the drawn animation and the green screen video (with chroma filter applied over a white background) in the Green Screen app by DoInk. The key to making this work is that you can use a "shared folder" between the two apps so that you can maintain your transparency around your drawing as you layer your work. I'm amazed at the results and the problem-solving my 5th graders undergo as they invent these video effects.

Since our fugleflick is about showing movement on a 2D plane, the above animation was a must for our story. The 5th grade filmmakers animated a still image using the doInk animation app over an image of paper. Then drew motion lines following the movement over the video in the same app. This video was then added to a background image of paper on a table using the Green Screen App by doInk. Yes, that was a lot of steps, but figuring out how to make magic happen is part of effective storytelling.

This video effect required tons of planning and imagination. There is actually more to it in the real movie than what you see here. It began with filming the dance and capturing a still moment from the very beginning. Then, the freeze frame was drawn frame by frame and saved as a movie using the DoInk Animation app. This was all piece together in layers using the green screen app by doInk. This 10sec effect took about an hour of planning and work.

UPDATE: View the finished Movie!
using this link

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Using Doink and Green Screen in iMovie

11/17/2012

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I've been playing with the animation app called Doink and combining it with green screen FX in iMovie. Below is a short video showing a layered animation over still images.
There are SO many possibilities for this technique.

I created this tutorial showing the iPad steps for making an animation in Doink, the steps I went through to use that animation as a video layer in iMovie over still images and video. See below or at this link.

View my other post/tutorial called, The Aliens Have Landed, about how to make aliens run using Doink.

You can view my students' video all strung together in iMovie at the link above as well.

You may be interested in viewing my post that shares some tricks for using green screen with animation created in Keynote.

These tutorials show how to create our award winning Fugleflick, Careers in Art. This video was selected as the best student video of 2011 in the NextVista.org student contests.

You may also be interested in trying Rotoscoping on the iPads.

This is the technique that helped us put STEAM in the McGraw-Hill Stemie Awards and $5000 in our school's bank account!

View a bunch more ideas for Creating on iPads on my page dedicated to this topic here.

UPDATE: Carol shared her green screen + Doink animation with me below:

@fuglefun @doinktweets Here is my attempt at talking about transliteracy. youtube.com/watch?v=Wsy-pq… using doink app and GarageBand
—Carol Broos (@musictechie) November 26, 2012

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Apps for Video FX

7/10/2012

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Way back when I was first playing with iMovie to make videos for my students I had to go through a very complicated process to do special effects. Be Kind to Your Erasers was filmed as two layers: one for the the finger and one for the lips. I used a third-party plug-in to create a picture in picture FX and did my best to layer the lips on to the fingers. It was inaccurately placed at times if the finger moved too much and the coloring didn't blend well. But, the results worked for me. I was only trying to convince my students to be kind to their erasers.
I remember destroying a Barbie Doll for the hair, painting a finger themed school room background, and using a twist tie for glasses. I was having a blast, giggling and playing like a 10 year old while putting the story together. I think I spent only a day or two of my summer vacation working on this video, but learned enough about editing imovie, script writing, and organizing a video to start doing this with my students the following school year. This is my favorite way to learn technology; by playing.

Now that I've acquired an iPad, I'm finding that there are apps that can be used for awesome video FX that would make recreating this movie much easier.
Funny Movie Maker- layers video over images (the lips effect). example
Paper Camera- makes rotoscoped looking videos. example
Doink-makes animated movies a piece of cake (like Flash but easier interface). example
Brushes- makes video from every stroke and choice made in creating art. example
FaceJack- does what Blabberize does for making an image talk. example
Puppet Pals or Explain Everything-make animated videos w/audio example

What else can we add to this list? Please chime in!

By the way, Be Kind to Your Erasers has a Cafe Press store where you can get the gear. The products feature my favorite line from the movie,
"Oh no! Not the hair!"
Trivia: Did you know this movie was made after I rented the video Thumbtanic.
Trivia: Did you know that I was once recognized at the NAEA conference after I said the word "eraser".
Learn more about Fugleflicks from this
Daily Edventures interview.

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