Shooting in the green screen room...

During the easter break, we had booked the green screen room to do some testing. It was just going to be random, as the whole point of this exercise was to figure out how to use chroma key. We also booked some lights, orange gels and a camera for that purpose.

While waiting for Lauren to get to uni, I went online and did some more research on how to use chroma key and how to set up the lights and stuff in the green screen room. I had only seen Mark's video on the blue screen thing once, as it was too big to put on my usb, so I went on youtube to find something similar, as I could not remember everything from Mark's video.

These are some of the resources that I helped me:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6brdwY-dvU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5GsbrgmUV8
- http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/ChromaLighting.htm
- etc

Some of the things I learned were:
- that the colours used for the screen are actually called 'true blue' and 'true green'
- blue and green for the screen because they are used because they are furthest away from the skin tone
- better results are achieved if the subject is not wearing any blue/green tones
- separate lights are required for the background (which should be evenly lit) and the subject
- the subject should be atleast 5ft away from the screen to prevent casting shadows
- gels are used to reduce the effect of light bouncing off the screen on the subject
- etc

After printing off the guide on how to use lighting equipment from the monash website, I joined Lauren in the green screen room. Both of us forgot to bring any tape for the camera! Fortunately Lauren had her digital photo camera with her. We decided to use this instead, since the library was closed and we didn't want to lost too much time looking for a tape.

So we set up the lights and everything and Lauren was to be our subject. We didn't use any gels at first, and the backlight kept casting a glare when you look through the camera..we had to move it a few times before finally getting the glare off the camera screen.

So after a few trials, we got a good lighting set up. We then used the gels...on all of the lights, haha! Lauren turned 'orange', but I figured this would be cool, since it might make it easier for her to standout from the green screen. We could always use colour correction later to make her look better.

We recorded something random for just a minute or two..enough to work with. The plan was that we both were going to work on chroma keying at home, but since she had not brought the usb cable for the camera along, I could not get it off her. So we figured maybe we could get a card reader from Mark Szota...who had none actually. So he sent me off to ITS. When I got there, two of my friends were already at the desk, so I had to wait. The lady asked me if I needed help, and then I asked her about a card reader. As it turns out, she had one on her personal laptop. Lucky me, the friend standing at the desk also had one! I decided to borrow the one from my friend, since it was a USB card reader...much easier to use.

So we managed to each get a copy of the recording which we were going to work on.