Students get creative with easy-to-use Ulead software at Mystic Aquarium

For the past several years, staff at the Mystic Aquarium & Institute of Exploration, one of the largest aquariums in the US, has been using Ulead products to produce in-house audiovisual content. The good folks at the aquarium recently sent us some pictures to tell us some more about what they were doing.

Audio Visual Specialist Clayton Nagy tells the story:

“The Amazon snapshots are from a 9-minute video of a slowly rising moon over an Amazon jungle that I created. The moon starts red over the horizon and takes a subtle gold color at its apex. Occasionally the viewer will see a flight of bats flicker across the moon. I had a good deal of fun learning Ulead’s COOL 3D software in order to create something like this for our exhibit. Ulead may or may not want to hear this, but to create the bats, I took a butterfly model and transfigured it to appear more sinister looking, and then colored it black!"

"The pictures here are still images taken from video, another neat feature you can do with Ulead video software."

"For the last year we've been schooling our WAVES Alternative Education students in the basics of video capture and editing, using a SONY VX-2000 3-chip mini DV camera. During an interview, they had the good luck to be on hand when this bluejay came to sit on Delphine’s hand, and we were able to film it. During their rotation between working in different departments, our students were instructed in the use of Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7.0 video capture and editing. When another student watching the lesson was asked to take over the editor's chair, I didn't need to repeat my instructions for their benefit. This really says something about the learning potential, attractiveness, and ease of use of this program."

"Lisa Mazzaro and Tracy Romano have recently tasked us with videotaping and editing visiting presenters in classroom B. Aside from creating a hard copy of the video on DVD, we're also able to upload the video onto our server's Public Drive in Windows Media Video (.wmv) or QuickTime format, so that any staff that could not attend the lecture are able to view it on their computers at their leisure."

"I still surprise people when I tell them that, yes, we can create our own DVDs here and that we're capable of feats such as audio editing for the animal trainers working on a show, creating excellent graphics depicting show times, and modifying or even repairing existing footage on display. Colleague Bruce Cousineau also created the Titanic "Did you know?" window and boiler flame that is being played in the Titanic exhibit. Normally you'd have to send this kind of thing out to a production studio, but we find that we're capable of doing quite a bit 'in house', and we have the growing confidence of the staff that this can all be utilized for their benefit."