I love Minecraft, so I’m always happy when I get a Minecraft-related project. Though I’m a bit squeamish for most nature documentaries, I’m a big fan of the BBC, so I was quite excited to learn that this project was for the BBC Planet Earth III Minecraft curriculum.

Photo editing

As a photographer, I feel that high-quality images are an important part of any learning experience. I took the raw images and screenshots provided by the BBC and edited them in Adobe Lightroom to make them bright and clear so learners can good idea of what each animal looks like. In the following screenshot of Adobe Lightroom, the original is shown on the left and my edited version on the right.

My Minecraft photo studio

To help learners recognize the same animals when they get into Minecraft, I took screenshots of each creature in the game. To make background removal easier, I created a Minecraft equivalent of a photo backdrop for the land animals. After taking the screenshots, I removed the backdrop using Adobe Photoshop.

For animals designed to be in water, I had to create some set dressing and put them in their element in order to show their whole bodies. As Minecraft screenshots tend to be a little dark, I also brightened them all up a little so the fact sheets wouldn’t feel heavy.

Document layout and formatting

For this project, I went with PowerPoint which is my favorite program for designing documents, because making documents accessible is much easier in PowerPoint than in Microsoft Word. To make important bits of information stand out and easier to find, I bolded parts of the text.

And when they were finished, I exported the fact sheets as PDFs to make them easily accessible to learners on all types of devices.

Check out the fact sheets on the Planet Earth III Minecraft Experience page on the Minecraft Education website.