Planning and creating a video!

In this post I will talk about how you can organize yourselves when creating creating a video.

Whenever we perform a task we have a goal to get with it. In the case of video is the same. Sometimes teachers shows videos to their students without reviewed it previously and that is not educative... this only serves to "entertain" students and to let them waste their time.

Use videos of others are a difficult task because these videos may have copyright (as I have mentioned above) or because these videos may not cover what we need.

As teachers, the best we can do is creating our own material and in this case create our own videos.
Create a video is complicated but through this post I will try to teach you how to do it and also I will show you how my team has created a great video for our project.

FIRST STEP: PLANNING THE VIDEO

It is important to plan what you want to appear in your video, because through this way when you go to make the video you already have the main ideas and it will be easier for you to create it.

To make our Video Planning we have used Storyboard That, which is a very useful and simple tool to make comics. It offers a big amount of free resources for you to develop your ideas and create stories related to any topic you wish.  

Creating and decorating the scenes and the characters has been really easy to do, as well as sequencing the images, writing the bubbles and organizing the story. We just had to drag with the mouse what we wanted to use and release it wherever we liked.  

Each frame of the comic represents an scene of the video. And here you can see our artifact which represent our video planning:

Once you have planned the video, you have to create it and record it so…

SECOND STEP: RECORD THE VIDEO

To create the video of our project we use a Chroma. A Chroma is an audiovisual technique that consists in changing an image of a fixed and uniform color (usually green or blue) for another different image selected from a computer. This technique is widely used in television.

Here you can see our making off:

 THIRD STEP: EDIT THE VIDEO

After recording the scenes with the Chroma, we have to edit and insert images we want to appear instead of green fabric. To do it we have used the Sony Vegas Pro program in order to chage the Chroma for animals' images. This program is complicated and difficult to use, but the results are very good so worth learning to use it.

After much work I have to say that we are very satisfied with the result. Do you want to see our video? 

LAST STEP: ENJOY!

These tasks were also part of a collaborative work, in this case with The ESL Times the official news magazine for collaborative ESL learners, and here you can see the award we received for taking part of the project:

As a final thought I have to say that at the beginning I was a little scary because of the idea of creating a video and post it on the internet, but my team has helped me to see this work in another way and now I think that create this video has been a very good idea. I'm sure I'll create more videos and also I'll share it with you.