Green Screen + Silhouettes... doable? (easily?)

S

Stephen_Stifano

New member
Preparing for a shoot tomorrow afternoon and had a question about greenscreening, since I've actually never done it before:

DVX100b // Final Cut Pro 6 // MacBook Pro 2.4ghz

The Scene involves two individuals standing in front of a projector screen which shows images of people. I was originally planning to do this *entirely* in camera tomorrow (using a powerpoint presentation via the projector to flip the images) - but issues with releases mean that I don't have the photos for tomorrow's shoot.

The actors will likely occupy the bottom third of the screen heightwise, and the right-most third of the screen widthwise. The rest will be the screen. I'm thinking of simply programming a green powerpoint slide, and having the actors stand in front of the massive green slide. Since they'll be silhouettes anyway, I'm guessing it'll be easy to key out the background and replace it with the photos?

Anyone have any suggestions or commentary as to how this'll work?

--Steve
 
so long as the screen you're projecting the green onto is nice and flat (i.e. produces a solid block of green), yes it should work ok. Make sure your actors don't stand too close to the screen - you don't want any of the screen's green light to be reflected back onto them.
 
I've done this before and it works great! If it is a lower resolution projector, just blur out the image and the green will be even. Also, the actors won't necessarily become silhouettes, at least not when I did it :)
 
Yeah. Just so there's no misunderstandings, I meant blur out the image by defocusing the projector lens, in case someone didn't know.

And make your actors stand as far as possible from the green screen.
 
Did this last night - worked magnificently. They were *supposed* to be silhouetted against the background, so we ran a test clip first (dumping live into FCP) and had great results, so we're quite excited. Extremely easy to key, considering there were only 2 colors in the frame (green, and black.) Wonderful - thanks everyone!
 
Stephen_Stifano said:
Did this last night - worked magnificently. They were *supposed* to be silhouetted against the background, so we ran a test clip first (dumping live into FCP) and had great results, so we're quite excited. Extremely easy to key, considering there were only 2 colors in the frame (green, and black.) Wonderful - thanks everyone!
Click to expand...

Just as an aside, why didn't you just use the 'white' bare bulb, if all you were tooking for was essentially a high contrast mask, and the use it as an alpha mask?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top