Book Trailers are an excellent way to communicate the excitement of reading while promoting new and/or favourite books. Similar a movie trailer, a book trailer is basically a video advertisement for a book.

Armed with their written trailer plans, Mme Savage and Mme Sprague’s Grade 4s came up to the Learning Commons to get their creative juices flowing, all while getting rid of oral presentation jitters!

In small groups, they learned how to chroma key using Green Screen by Do Ink. The basic green screen effect works by combining images from two sources into a single image, using the chroma key filter to create transparent regions in the foreground image and then compositing the result with the background image. In their case, the students wanted to appear either in front of, or a part of their book cover/title page.

They recorded their convincing arguments, and imported the video footage into iMovie. From there, they learned how to add photos, edit each clip and add music and transitions. They even learned how to apply a Ken Burns effect! The Ken Burns effect is a type of panning and zooming effect used in video production from still imagery. The name derives from extensive use of the technique by American documentarian Ken Burns.

Student trailers have been uploaded to Google Drive. This will allow them to share with their fellow classmates as well as their families. They are looking forward to using their new skills in future projects… budding directors, producers and editors abound!