I’ve been wanting a permanent green screen setup in class for a really long time now! For the last few years I have been using a polyester screen hanging off a wall mount with pegs. It was flimsy, always crumpled and never stationary. Plus with space constraints, I couldn’t dedicate a wall for the screen as every square inch of wall area is covered with posters and/or shelves.

With some kiwi ingenuity, my school custodian, Roland Boekhoff, came up with a brilliant idea of hanging a screen using an old roller blind which could be easily tucked away.

The material for the screen would need to be a bit more durable and thick compared to the existing material I had. We managed to source a good quality fabric off Trig Instruments (who unfortunately do not sell that material anymore due to lack of sales).

Once we measured up the area of our screen and the roller blind, Roland got building. The end product is just awesome and works fine. Currently there isn’t an even source of lighting but we are working on some external lamps for the screen.

Meanwhile, with some spare green paper, I recycled old cardboard boxes for the Year 9 students to film smaller table-top scenes for stop frame animation project. I cut out two holes on the sides for the lights. The lighting is achieved by using clip-on lamps refitted with LED bulbs so that the set is lit up well without burning the paper. I am using     C920 Logitech Web cameras for filming the stop frame animation as that camera, I believe is the cheapest High definition camera which has manual focus ( very important for stop frame). The next part is the batch processing of images which is going to be tedious and boring. Students are looking into softwares for next year like green screen wizard and Dragonframe which can batch process with ease. Currently we are testing out Helium Frog animator (http://www.heliumfrog.com/heliumfrogindex.html) and achieving mixed results. One student who brought a copy of Stop Motion Pro on his mac has been achieving good results and its ease of use is commendable. This project will take a term (2 lessons a week for ten weeks) from start to finish.