Earth Day, Film, and iMovie

For our elementary school's inaugural Earth Day celebration, our music teacher crafted some creative lyrics and choreography to the Miley Cyrus tune "Hoedown Throwdown". Despite what you may think of Miley and her tunes, the kids thoroughly enjoyed the song. With 2 Canon GL-2's, a Sony Digital HD camera, and the assistance of our local electric company (who allowed me to travel up in the cherry picker for overhead shots!), we caught it on film.
After recording the audio track of the performance on Tuesday morning, we caught 2.5 takes on film. Using firewire, I imported all 3 cameras' footage onto my MacBook using iMovie, making a separate event for each camera. From here I went about selecting the first scene of the video. I had some difficulty getting it to match up correctly with the audio once I imported that track from iTunes, but I found that placing a large section of video into the project which lasted longer than the entire audio track made it easier to manipulate the timing of the first scene (and all subsequent scenes for that matter). I simply deleted the superfluous video from the end once the edit was complete.
What I found to be very helpful in iMovie were the precision editing tools. Pulling in clips from each camera feed made it tricky to match the words/motions up with the audio track. The precision editing features made this a bit simpler. While the original audio was captured inside on an earlier day, it didn't feature any live clapping. That was problematic since the kids in the video are clapping along with the song. Each clip imported into the project can have its audio altered to be either raised or lowered. I lowered the volume on each clip enough to still allow clapping to come through, but not much else. The main audio track overtook any extra noise I didn't want.
While other video editors for the Mac may offer more features and a simpler means to edit multiple camera feeds, iMovie (falling quite below the $200 tag of Final Edit Express) got the job done.
Here's the final result:

(google) Earth Day

I'm sure our school is not alone in our celebration of Earth Day for this week. Aside from teaching simplified PowerPoints (emphasis on simplified) with conservation-themed content, and keeping my printer free from paper lest anyone print, we'll be using Google Earth to explore global concerns.
If you're not familiar or have never used this tool, by all means go and download it. In the side bar on the left of the program, you'll find a section called Layers. In the layer tab, look for the section titled "Global Awareness". If you expand the "folder" you'll find over a dozen organizations or subjects which have links all over Google Earth.
I've included an instructional Prezi on how we'll be using this layer in our technology classes this week.

(google) Earth Day on Prezi