Shooting in the green screen room...3

We booked the green screen room again the following week for the final shooting session of semester 1.

From the last session we realised that we were going to need more lights and...more time! We ended up booking the room for the afternoon so that we could stay after hours and finish everything. Since we had to keep all the equipment with us until the next day, we decided we would just drop everything back to my place (10 mins walk away)

For this session, we had 6 sets of lights/gels!! Plus the set that Mark left for us on the previous week. Again it took us about an hour to set everything up. Lauren had brought a green blanket along that we were going to use to move the skull around. Steph and Jamie were in the green screen room the same morning and they left us their green boxes to use. (yayy!)

The place looked like some big movie set after we were done unpacking eveything! So many lights..haha :)

After playing around with some different settings, we managed to get a bright 'ring' of light on the floor. This was going to make the whole chroma keying process a lot easier for me, as I figured I would not have to use a different setting on the leg. With so many lights, we also hoped we would get a really good outline around the subject.

After a few scenes (the first few scenes had no dialogues) we realised that there was actually no sound at all being recorded. We played around with the mic and the camera connection for a while, but nothing worked. So we got a different microphone, but it wasnt working either. By that time it was already 18h and the office was closed. We decided we would have to change some of the scenes for this semester's submission. We would record the dialogues seperately and then use them in scenes where you could not actually see the speaker's face. Since we had already planned on having a few shots like this, it was no big deal. We will be shooting those scenes again, with proper sound next semester.

We had some trouble with scenes where we had the skull because we had to use the boxes and the green blanket. The blanket was thrown on Steve and he had to hold the skull. There was a lot of shadows on the blanket itself but also on the box. I tried my best to get rid of them, but there was still some which I could not do anything about.

We also could not hide the hand holding the skull as the blanket was not big enough. (at home I realised there was a possible solution to this, but it was too late) .


All in all, everything went well, except for the sound. We managed to shoot most of the scenes we needed. Exceptions to this would be:-
- the scenes with the notice paper (we did not have time to prepare the papers)
- scenes where the actors can be seen talking

A few hours after we got back home, I got a message from Lauren saying we cannot use the last part of the footage. I went back to check..and as it turns out, Steve forgot to take off his glasses while recording this scene...argh! (another shot that we would have to omit for the first semester and shoot again next semester).