Character Animator – Bring School Posters to Life

by
Primary School Project – Viking Ship

I love almost all of the Adobe products, and one of my clear favourites is Character Animator. It has brought many a smile to my face and that of students and teachers who have been introduced to this amazing tool. First – what is character animator? Character Animator uses your expressions and movements to animate characters in real time. Using your webcam and microphone, Character Animator matches your expressions — from syncing lips to tracking eyes — to animate in real time. Select from hundreds or pre-built puppets or custom make your puppet using Photoshop, Fresco or Illustrator. It’s so fast, you can livestream while you work to wow audiences every step of the way. Your performance brings a character to life.

This post is about how you can easily integrate Character Animator into your primary class lessons on any subject as an add on product/project to any assignment projects you give to your students.

Read more

Is story capture worth it?

by

It’s 10 o’clock at night and I want to write a post about creating multimedia stories. In the background my computer is copying a number of large video files from my GOPRO into a central location. Part of me has writer’s block and part of me simply wants to go to sleep. I’m sure a lot of teachers wanting to enthuse students into writing stories, creating multimedia essays encounter the same challenges with students who question why should they do it. Unless it’s a grade-based assignment it’s sometimes hard to convince someone that documenting, recording or capturing experiences and events… and transforming that into story shared with someone else is something worthwhile doing.

With the previous paragraph I’m already over my allowed tweet limit. So I know that with a meme like photograph and a hundred or two hundred characters I could put something out now and my work here would be done.

Read more

GoPro 8 with Media Mod and Tips

by

The GoPro8 is a great camera and I have had mine for about 9 months. I use it extensively on my small ultralight plane and recently on my lockdown walks around Melbourne I have carried it in my pocket as the inbuilt gimbal provides smooth footage even when walking with it and holding it in my hand.

Flinders Street during lockdown stage 4 – 2020

Read as I provide some usability tips in the context of using the GoPro with a class of young students.

Read more

Loving PhotoShop Camera

by

You have to try out this cool free app from Adobe which works on iOS and Android.

Open the immersive web page embedded below to view some of the photos of places around the Kensington, Flemington, Footscray and Docklands areas of the inner north of Melbourne taken during recent lockdown walks around my house.

See what you can do with photos of your everyday surroundings.

PhotoShop Camera

Read more

My Favourite Microphone

by

I love my Blue Yeti microphone and although these microphones are pretty easy to use, the other day I was watching a webinar and the guy was sitting on the edge of his desk looking like he was talking into a Yeti microphone.

I say “looking like” because he had the microphone around the wrong way and was pointing the tip to his mouth… Clearly he hadn’t read the manual.

blue-yeti-microphone-side-address

What made it worse was that he is a professor of multimedia or something like that and folks would be looking at him and thinking… “He’s a professor so I must be using my microphone wrong” Which is exactly what I did and after re-reading the manual and checking on YouTube I confirmed that I was right…

So I thought seeing as we have recently awarded three of these microphones to our incredibly cool video competition winners in the Northern Territory – North, South and Remote. You can check out all the great entries here.

Read more

Free Adobe Tools and Learning – Follow Me

by

Join me on the Adobe Education Exchange. It’s helpful for learning new digital skills and downloading free tutorials & project ideas. It’s also great for connecting with other creative educators and getting help. Plus, it’s free!

Join for free

The education exchange in Adobe is the perfect place for educators to sign up for free to learn to use Adobe tools in their classroom or life. What I love about it is that when you join a course or simply browse through the reference material – you not only feel as if you are learning something useful for yourself and your students, but it is fun and you feel like part of a community.

Read more

Assigning a shortcut key in Word

by

This might be a little ho hum for some people. But let me give you a practical use for it. I copy and paste a lot of text.

In Windows and Word’s efforts to be helpful, when you paste – all the formatting comes with it – of course that is generally different to your formatting so it messes up your document…

Solution?

Read more