Finally, today has come! This day is the day where we finally act out our scenes using out puppets and prepare them for out backgrounds. For this we created a green screen in order to quicken the process of editing out the backgrounds of the real images to replace with our digital ones, completing this world we have created.
How we did it was to have each of the students hold their prospective puppets while we capture the images using a still digital camera. We had a green screen created from green paper rolled out with light cast upon it for the ease of editing. I enjoyed the final project, but if we were to do it again, I think we would have made bases for the rods so that the characters wouldn't move around as much because it is a lot to ask of the students to hold these figures up for an extended period of time like we did. But in the end, it was a good product.
As I stated before in my last post, steel wool is a little dangerous and this was proven in one of the scenes. We were pulling the steel wool off of Icarus' wings to act out the scene of his wings falling apart and I managed to get metal slivers and cut up my hands which would be a hazard if the student was in my shoes. It is important to setup safety measures regardless of what materials you're working with.
After we finished capturing our hundred something images, we had to prepare them for next week's animation. This was to be no easy task because we had to run through over 40 images a piece for each mentor which was not a fast task. I strongly encourage getting an easy system together for cropping out the excess if repeating this project. It would not be reasonable for one teacher to edit an entire classroom's compilation of images in the real world.
This was a good week, albeit busy.
