Monday, 17 March 2014

Chroma key

 

Chroma key is a system where special effects are used to turn a plain green background into any background you want. It consists of layering two images on top of each other depending on their colour hue. This method is usually used in films as it means that the actors can stay in a studio where the background can be changed instead of traveling all over the world. This is also used to remove backgrounds, a colour range in the layer on top is made transparent which shows the image behind it. This technique can be see in weather reports so that the background can move etc.

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Lesson plan based on the gaming seminar

Today we worked in groups to come up with a lesson plan, this is what we came up with. As we had never written a lesson plan before it was pretty difficult, but as time went on we began to understand what we were doing. Below is the finished plan. Games Station Lesson Plan Learning Objectives – Year Six For children to; Learning Objective: •To write a creative story setting based on visual stimuli Previous learning: •Previous Literacy work based on stories/use of consoles children familiar with. •Draw on previous knowledge of the gun powder plot and bonfire night. Key skills Explore, plan, develop and reflect ideas responding to visual stimuli Analyse, structure and organise work Use language creatively Explain, predict and describe Appraise their own work and that of others Resources Dr Who ‘Gun Powder Plot’ game on PC Introduction: 30 mins 1.Explain to children that they will be looking at the Dr Who game on the PC over the course of the week, as a build-up to writing their own creative piece. Ask the children to decide in groups what the ground rules should be for using the consoles, the game and deciding roles. 2.When playing the game, ask the children to record what they are seeing and any words that they may not understand. 3.Once, this has been done the groups will feed back to the class. They will describe what they saw in the game and discuss the words they didn’t understand, discuss definitions. Main activity: 1 hour Groups 4.In groups ask the children to log on and open the Dr Who game. 5.Get the children to play the introduction of the game, to get to the beginning of the ‘Gun Powder Plot’ section. 6.Ask the children to imagine that they are in the game. Get them to discuss where they think they are, what they can see, what they might be able to smell, what they can hear. They can also note what they think people would be wearing during the time of the gun powder plot. With this information they will write a paragraph setting the scene. 7.Once they have done this, they will make hats from, that era, so that they can imagine they are Dr Who. Whole Class 8.Discuss with the children what they know about bonfire night in their ear e.g. what they do, what they see, where they go. Is there a comparison against what happened in the game and the traditions we have now to celebrate this day? 9.What did they learn from the game? Give them a list of words to define from the game. What will they use them for? Ask the children to share their ideas on role play between Dr Who and Guy Forks, which can contribute to a story. Plenary: 30 mins Discuss what they know at the end of the lesson compared to the beginning of the lesson Share their descriptive paragraph with the rest of the class. Questions to explore understanding What do we know about characters, their personality and their appearance? Why are they there? What do they have to do? What helped/hindered you? What previous knowledge did you use? Key vocabulary Setting Scent Appearance Texture Location Assessment of success Marking their own work and observation in the classroom (of role play etc)

Stop Motion Assignment - Practice

Our assignment brief for this module was to work in groups to create a stop motion animation which portrays a message. For this seminar we were told to work in groups to practice our stop motion animation skills to ensure that we were able to use all the software and understood how a stop motion animation works. We decided to do our practice stop motion around the story of dinosaurs, we used lego people and plastic dinosaurs with a background of trees. I really enjoyed doing this stop motion animation and it did give me and my group a number of ideas for our final piece. It also helped us realise the problems that can arise, firstly our figures were to stiff which meant that when we tried to move them it looked awkward, also we kept bumping into the camera which meant that each time we took a new picture it was in a different position and did not look as good. We also released that even though Zu3D is considered one of the best softwares for stop motion animations we decided to look into using a different program.