Digital Media and Learning Competition

After a tipoff from FutureLab's Flux blog, I decided to enter this year's Digital Media and Learning Competition with a version of the epic cross-curricular Mars Mission based project I blogged about a while back. I called it Mars Missioneers and shoehorned as much detail as I could into the meagre 300 word limit on the application.
The judges obviously saw the potential of it and recently chose it to be one of 50 out of the many 100s of submissions to go through to the final round of the competition, amongst such big players as FutureLab themselves and Mitchel Resnick of MIT Scratch fame! After I had picked myself up off the floor, I set about the (surprisingly mammoth) effort of creating a three minute video describing the concept behind the project. That effort today came to fruition! Here is the finished product:



I used a number of free tools in the creation of the video - Blender for the title sequence, Audacity for the audio recording and mixing, prezi for the panning and zooming graphics portions and the ingenious xtranormal for the animated narrator sequences. I discovered that they allow you to render the character on a green screen, which means you can composite the footage onto whatever back ground you desire. Combine that with iMovie '09 and you have the tools to make something that looks halfway decent for very little investment (other than the time involved!). If you would like to comment on the project, I would appreciate it enormously if you could take the time to register at the DMLC site and leave a comment on the project page. Comments close on the 22nd April, so time is rather short!