Green screen?

K

kevin baggott

Well-known member
Hi,
I'm writing/directing a new indy pilot and I have a scene where an actor (me unfortunately) needs to break out of the trunk of a car lined with garbage bags and run down a busy city Brooklyn street escaping some mob dudes.
If I have to do it I have to do it. Just wondering, I never used Green Screen, is it possible to do this shot with green screen on an indy budget and make it look realistic? I doubt it... But thought I'd ask.
Thanks for taking a look.
Kevin

PS - this question has been edited - but the gist of it remains.
 
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Not really. Green screen usually means movement and simple stuff like pans and tilts gets very complicated. Locked off shots work, but to run away from the camera takes a very large green screen studio. I suppose you could paint a running machine green and run on that then shrink the image?
 
It may be doable if you can design your shot to make it easier for the green screen effect to look realistic.

For example - it can be difficult to place the feet of a person walking/running on green screen into the environment realistically. If you don't show the feet, that makes it easier.

The easiest shot is probably a close-up or medium close-up of the person running towards camera where they stay stationary in the frame (as if the camera were tracking with them) and the background moves behind them to indicate that they're running down the street.

I would definitely conduct tests to see how it looks. You could even find sample footage here that you could play with to get a quick sense of how it may look in the end: https://www.pond5.com/search?kw=girl-running-green-screen&media=footage

Without too much trouble or fakeness-looking, you could probably do a full-length profile shot from a low-angle that cuts off at your ankles so you don't see the interaction with the ground. And composite that against a shot of the street where the camera was at a similar low angle and moving laterally down the street. Of course, this assumes that you want to show full frontal nudity. You may just want a butt shot or shirtless shot and then reactions of shocked passersby or something, I dunno.

Whatever you decide to do, I would carefully test a similar set-up in advance. With a little finesse and creativity, you could pull off something convincing. But it really depends on the specifics of the shot - how the actor interacts with the background - and if there is camera movement and what type of movement, as paulears said.

For one shot in the montage, it would be easy to have a blurry butt pass across this shot in the foreground and then see the reactions of the couple inside:
pershing-square-friends-with-benefits.jpg

If you want the character running down the sidewalk towards camera in this shot, then aside from matching the lighting and worrying about how the interaction of feet/floor will look, you really want to match the camera height and angle and have the actor run across the floor/treadmill on a matching plane as in the shot. In other words, it wouldn't be simple or easy. But I'm not a VFX artist, so maybe I'm just a pessimist:
IMG_9442-scaled.jpg
 
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You could wear green pants* and remove them in post.. or more likely a Gstring to keep yourself decent when out in public.

Or change the script a bit.


*pants = english for underwear
 
This girl from a short I shot is not naked but has skimpy flesh toned 'pants' and maybe even a bra - I cant remember. Clearly backlighting, shakey cam, flare and all the rest keep her as glimpses and the look is pulled off.

nude.jpg..
 
Thanks guys for all the suggestions. It's given me some ideas that I will further research. Merci. I really appreciate it.
 
I say just do it for real, early in the AM or late at night. Green screen sucks all around. PITA to shoot, make work, light for, composite,
I am not a fan and I have shot a LOT of green screen/blue screen/even red screen for shooting plants that have tons of blue and green in them.

If you need full frontal, that's riskier but if you just need the comedic butt shot, I don't think it's a big deal, especially in NYC. I mean before the Pandemic,
the Desnudas in Times Square were everywhere. New Yorkers are generally pretty jaded to most things, but of course if a cop sees you, different story.
 
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