
White House Film Festival! We have been working on this video since early December when we first learned of this opportunity. The video shows how our fifth graders have been using technology for art production and art instruction in our classroom from kindergarten through present. We were able to base the video on the presentation that a group of them gave while in 4th grade to pre-service art teachers in Montreal, Canada via Skype. View that event here. We had 29 students volunteer to work on this video during their lunch recesses. They were each assigned a segment with a rhyming verse to memorize. The segments were customized to each actor as much as possible showing video or stills of them or their artwork. Every segment was exported as a video clip and brought into the iPad to use as the background image in the DoInk Green Screen app. They stood before our classroom green screen and recorded their portion while the app magically replaced the green with their custom backgrounds. We learned quickly not to wear green on recording day. We also tried to adhere to the guidelines of the film festival and not show any 3rd party images or logos. Wearing a smock was the logical solution to cover them up. We had the whole film finished a week before winter break. When we went to edit it we realized that the audio was very poor. Our iPad microphone wasn't able to capture audio well enough to use the clips. The audio was so low that there was absolutely nothing my software could do to fix it. I tried all the tricks I knew. So I bought a microphone adaptor for the iPad so we could use the lapel mic that the art room already owned and filmed it all over again. This was a lesson in trying our best, being persistent, and having a good attitude. Our fifth graders passed this test with flying colors. See our video below.

Original recording without external mic. | Second recording with external mic. |
@fuglefun brilliant use of green screen, editing and design. Excellent audio as well. http://t.co/Q8JwfHwDP6
ā Brad Wright (@Veescope) January 19, 2014
@fuglefun Truly inspiring work. Your students are AMAZING!!! Well done!
ā Rushell Kwong (@Rush4theArts) January 19, 2014
@fuglefun @whitehouse @doinktweets @drydenschool Beautiful work & well-done! Please let your students know I love their video!
ā Colleen Rose (@ColleenKR) January 19, 2014