Advertisement Project

Rollmio is an ingenious new website base around the idea of user produced advertisements! The site seems to be able to get commissions for online advertisements (they're only on their forth so far, but it is a start up site), then users come along, read the brief and produce and submit an advertisement (10 - 60 second video)that should fit the brief. The advertisement that the company likes best wins a prize ($500) and there are also some runner up prizes.


For more videos, rollmio.com

How to use this with students
This seems like the ideal site to build a project around and get your students creating and uploading their own advertisements. You could even try to win the prize for your school.

• You might need to do some preparation work first discussing their favourite ads what they like about the etc.
• Then you'll also need to do a bit of analysis of ads thinking about who the target of the ad is and the kind of profile of people the company wants to sell to etc.
• You could also get your students to think about advertising techniques and genre of advertisements (story like, expert, celebrity endorsement etc)
• Your students could then discuss and story board a possible advertisement and decide who will do what in the production of the advertisement.
• Then if you have a camera try to get them to film, edit and upload the ads (If you have young learners make sure you get the parents permission before uploading anything)
• You can see the latest creative brief here: http://rollmio.com/projects/brief/4
• You could even use celtx with your students to help develop your project
  

The ads on the site aren't of a terrifically high / professional quality, they're mainly novel, so it isn't beyond the means of your students to compete with these.

• If you don't have filming facilities / camera then you could just get your students to have a look at the ones that have been made in the archive and decide which they think is most effective / which will win.

What I liked about the site

• Really attractive and user friendly interface
• Really very authentic, motivating and a chance to make some money!!
• It's free
• It's easy to get an embed code so that you can add the videos to your own materials if you don't want your students to actually view the site.
  

What I wasn't so sure about

• Still early days for this site, so it could be a huge success or by the time you read this it may have disappeared along with a great many other Web 2.0 type sites!!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and get to use it before that happens.

Best

Nik

Read More

Machinima with Moviestorm

I recently came across a very impressive piece of software for making Machinima. It’s still in Beta at the moment, and it’s free, so I’ve spent a bit of time looking at it and seeing how it works.

For those of you who don’t know, machinima is a form of animated cinema, which is produced in computer games or virtual worlds. In some case the animated characters are ‘played’ by avatars and in others the characters are figures within a virtual world which are controlled by a ‘producer’.

Moviestorm offers the second of these two options, so once you have downloaded it from the Moviestorm site, you no longer need an internet connection and you can work alone or with a group to produce your machinima project.

The software is pretty impressive and can enable you to do many things. You can;

• create stage sets and characters,
• place the characters on the set
• get them to move and interact with each other and various props
• place cameras around the set to film the action from different places
• create and record a script for your characters
• lip-sync the animated characters with the recorded dialogue
• cut, edit and render your final movie in a format which can easily be distributed on the web or CD.

So this is pretty much all you need to get started creating machinima movies.

• Here’s a demo movie to show how to create the action
• Here’s a demo movie to show how to film the action

So why do this with students?
The learning potential of the software is huge, even if you don’t ever get your students to a stage where they can produce their own movies.

• You can get them to create characters and change them to practice language of description
• You can use it to practice a whole range of clothing, colours and textures
• You can get them to create a set and place things to practice prepositions of place
• You can create your own movies to demonstrate a whole range of prepositions of movement, various tenses
• You can add dialogue to the movies to demonstrate functional and intercommunicative language

Personally I feel though that the software is ideal for project work. You can get your students working together in groups on their own machinima projects. They can right a screen play and a script it. Record themselves and lip-sync to the animated characters, decide on and create their own scenes and stage sets. Even the act of learning ho to use the software would make for an excellent project. There is an online forum where users of the software can exchange ideas and help each other.

You would probably need to run the project over the space of a few weeks or even months and be sure to specify to students before they begin how you intend to evaluate their work on the project. I’m sure that most students would find this a motivating and creative way to practice language.

What I liked about it

• It’s free, not too difficult to learn and doesn’t involve any programming skill.
• Once you’ve downloaded it you don’t need an internet connection to use it
• The tool set is great and you can make the animated characters do a whole range of things and film them from loads of different angles
• It’s fun to use and learn and easy enough so that you can install the software and produce a short clip within an hour
• Any films you produce with the software are your own property and you have the right to sell and distribute them!!

What I wasn’t so sure about

• It’s a big download (almost 200Mb) so you’ll either need a good connection or a lot of patience to download it.
• There are expansion packs with more stage sets, props and characters but you have to pay for these (not that you really need them)
• There’s no MAC version and you need a pretty good graphics card and a lot of RAM for it to run easily

On the whole I think this is really one to watch. As more people start using it and the forum / user community builds up I think this will turn into an excellent resource.

If you want to find out more about Machinima have a look at a few of these links.

Machinima.com
The home of machinima and probably one of the biggest collection of machinima films and links.

Machinima and education
An interesting article from Futurelab on the uses and benefits of including machinima in education


SecondLifeVideo.com
A site designed to help machinima creators within the virtual world of Second life to upload and share their creations.
Here’s a widegt from their site that shows some of the arts machinima being created in SL



Wikipedia
More information and a definition from Wikipedia

I hope you enjoy the software and I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets their students working with it.

Read More

Subtitling your video clips

I’ve just been looking at a really excellent Beta site called Dot Sub

The site is an interesting adaptation of the Youtube model. People can upload videos (up to 300Mb) and share them among limited groups or with everyone.

What’s really interesting though about Dot Sub is that it is aimed at subtitling and translation for people with hearing problems. The video tool allows you to input subtitles beneath the clip. These can either be translations or transcriptions. Users can also upload clips for others to translate for them. The site isn’t limited to English only and so the translations or transcriptions for the subtitles and film clips could be in any language.

This is really a marvelous idea and has bags of potential for language teaching and development.

Here’s a few ideas off the top of my head.

• Upload a film clip (in English) and ask students to translate or transcribe it. They can then compare with your own translation / transcription.
• Transcribe a clip with some errors and see if they can spot / correct them.
• Ask students to independently translate a clip of a poem and then compare their different versions.
• Ask students to create their own video clips (If students have their own cameras or webcams) upload them and then get another member of the class to transcribe it.
• They could just browse and translate or transcribe one of the existing videos.
• Transcribe in what people are thinking as opposed to what they are saying
  

Here’s a video produced by the site with a very fast explanation of how it all works.


The site is free and registration is quite quick. So check it out at: http://www.dotsub.com
By all means let me know what you think and post a comment here.

Best
Nik

Read More

Developing screencast tutorials

There's a very handy web based tool called Screencast-o-matic that I've just spotted. If you go to the website and simply click on 'Create' you should be able to record and make movies of your on screen activity. This isn't anything new as there are quite a few software tools that you can either buy or download to do this, but what's good about this tool as that it all works through the web page and also allows you to create an account and save your screencasts online. This makes it much easier to share them.

The tool is very easy to use and it looks like it's even capable of recording some quite complex screen activity, such as gaming and 3D virtual worlds. You can also record audio voice over. Great stuff and all free.

Read More

BBC online media training

I’ve just seen that the BBC has released a lot of its own internal staff training courses and made them available free online at: http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCourses.asp


What's on the site?
I’ve had a look through the courses and they really are good, especially if you want to work with audio for podcasts or video for projects. Some of them are very short, so even if you only have 10 – 15 mins to spare you can still get some development from them. I looked at one on interviewing for radio:

• This one has some really useful audio files of interviews which you could actually use with your students for listening activities. There is also a collection of short vox pops interviews which have a huge range of different UK accents.

I also looked at one on the basic principles of shooting good video footage.

• It had lots of short video clips with audio voice over and they all had text transcriptions available. The clips were all quite short, so they wouldn’t take too long to download even if you have a slow connection.

There are also quite a few on the software and technology side of editing the materials. All of them have clear slow commentary and great visuals. This really is useful material even for people who are basic beginners with this kind of technology.

A really useful site whether you’re looking for authentic listening materials for your students, teaching journalism or media classes or looking to develop your own ability and understanding of video and audio technology.

Read More