I really wanted to use green screen again, but really enjoy speaking and recording my voice, not my person. So I created an avatar using http://www.buildyourwildself.com/ and saw that I could change the mouth to 4 different stages. I set out to create a talking avatar. This is harder then you might think for an amateur. As I used some free animated animals for this video, I had a new respect for those making animations. I tried to create a gif, because I knew that it would show the mouth moving on the avatar but I couldn't upload it to Camtasia and have it showing the gif, also there was the white background that it recorded to and I would have to paste a lot of gifs in order to have the avatar speak throughout 50 percent of the video.
After downloading the avatars and using the loop on my Mac, I still needed to create my talking avatar. So I used Google Presentation, using the green screen as the background and pasting every 4th avatar with different mouths in 48 pages on the presentation. Then I opened Camtasia to a my project and recorded me clicking through that presentation from beginning to end about 8 times. I wanted to get a full 5 minutes of my talking avatar to use in the science video without having to cut and paste in the video.
As I recorded my video of all my pictures and information, I then dropped my avatar video above that on a track and used the green screen effect to drop it onto my avatar video. Using the color picker, I easily matched my green to the green background of the avatar video and then it disappeared beautifully. It was extremely hard to match the avatars voice movement with my own, so that part needs improvement. I do think, however, that I may use my avatar, Ms.Wild, in other science videos. It is a lot of work just not to video my own person. But now I realize how cartoons probably got started. :)
Here is the video about Habitats:
Here is the video instructions:
