This year Amherst Middle School's musical was written by our own creative team of music teachers. This gave us the ability to record and sell it on DVD as a fundraiser. It was titled, "It's Middle School...The Musical" and was a big hit!
The "Collector's Edition" DVD our kids produced was absolutely phenominal! It contains the entire recorded performance shot with 2 camera angles, a slideshow set to the show's music, and a 30 min documentary containing cast interviews and bloopers.
It still is available for purchase HERE, if anyone is interested in seeing an example of what can be generated with Adobe software.
Below are 2 video segments you can watch, and a summary of how 8 different Adobe products were used in our workflow:
Video #1- Making of a Musical (32 mins)
Video #2- Slideshow Created with Adobe PhotoShop Elements 7
Summary of Adobe Software used (in no particular order):
Visual Communicator 3- All interview footage was captured with VC3 so we could use the greenscreen live and publish out all clips as AVI.
Ultra CS3- Virtual sets of male and female hosts were made with Ultra.
On Location (formerly DV Rack)- Used to record evening performance. Two laptops were setup for this, so we had 2 cams to switch with in the editing room afterwards.
Premiere Pro CS3- Used the multicam edit feature for switching between cameras in post production.
Premiere Elements 7- Used for majority of production, all editing and DVD authoring was done in PRE7.
PhotoShop Elements 7- Slideshow was generated in PSE7 after the pics were edited for brightness, contrast, etc.
SoundBooth CS4- Used to cleanup audio when needed, and to strip the audio from the video for use as background audio during slideshow.
Acrobat 9- Used for distributing flyers for DVD sales.
Overall the nice part was the tight integration between various Adobe products, which helped the kids and I learn new software rather quickly. Lots of fun indeed!
