The Green Screen Effect

The opening sentence in an article posted on edutechteacher.org titled "Video in the Classroom" states "In addition to being fun and motivating, video projects teach students to plan, organize, write, communicate, collaborate, and analyze (2012)." The author goes on to say "With the proliferation of webcams, phone cameras, flip cams, digital recorders, and editing tools, video has exploded in the media lives of students." In other words, creating video clips in the classroom is a powerful tool for the advancement of student learning and it is something which children really like to do. As an added bonus I discovered how to add different backgrounds to video clips using something called the green screen effect. The green screen effect is a technique used in video editing to replace one part of a image with another. The technique, called chroma key, is used by video editing software to select one color in the original video clip or picture (in this case green) and make it transparent so the image placed "behind" it comes through. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how easy it is to use the green screen effect with still photographs to make a short video clip with a cool background.