Honeybees in a Hologram?

Mrs. Rossman's 4th grade students at West Holt Public School have become experts on honey bees! They wanted to share what they learned with others and thought that creating a hologram might be a memorable experience for all.

First the students researched and learned all the amazing facts about the honey bee. They compiled their research into topics and each constructed a short "script" to explain key findings.

I (Mrs. Morrow) visited the group and showed them how to build hologram "projectors" to use to view hologram videos (from YouTube) on their iPads.  Each student built their own and many questions were asked that added to our collective curiosity, such as "What is the biggest hologram we could create?"

On my next visit, I worked with the kids to begin to create their video.  We decided that the best approach would be a live action video (rather than an app-animated video) and knew we needed to film in front of a green screen in order to make our video appear on a solid black background (for the hologram).

Mrs. Rossman and the students collected great props and costumes and the students brought their scripts to life in front of the green screen!

I initially planned to use the DoInk Green Screen app to assemble the clips, but it was actually easier to do the additional editing (and the green screening) all in iMovie on the Mac.  This made adding the voice over even easier as well.

On my last visit with the group, the kids each recorded their scripts narrating the scenes as voice-overs right in iMovie.  In doing so, they could view the source clip in real time and time out their reading somewhat.

We exported from iMovie and had one full size video, which can be viewed on YouTube here:

The final step was to AirDrop this video to each of the students' iPads.  We started a new Keynote file, widescreen format with black background. We inserted the video once and re-sized it to smaller dimensions. Then we copied and pasted, and rotated the video three more times. (90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees) Using Keynote's guides we aligned the four videos so that all the "feet" were touching the inside borders, and attempted to make that interior "window" in the shape of a square.  An animation needed to be added to all four videos so that they all played automatically in unison (and not in succession of each other).

Note from Katie: The widescreen format of our video proved challenging to forming that inner square. It was a bit easier to see if we changed the background color of the Keynote slide to something other than black, and then changed it back at the end. I overlapped the videos a bit trying to get the hologram image as large as possible, but still somewhat centered in the projector pyramid. Also, I muted the sound (turned volume to 0) on three of the video clips to avoid the echo-ish sound that is typical of these video projects.  

So, now our hologram video was complete and we published it on YouTube as well.  Now any iPad with any hologram projector anywhere can enjoy the amazing bee knowledge of these fabulous 4th graders!