Live footage or layered through greenscreen?

H

Heartfelt

Well-known member
I am soon shooting shots at our facility (kinda like a plant) with lots of activity and noise.

I have until today been planning to shoot interviews in the environment. I also will have some
green-screen studio shots interspersed. It occurred to me today that another possibility would
be to shoot plant footage, add some blur, and set a green screen interview on top.

The thought is to create a shallow depth of field effect.

I have been toying with the latter today and it looks pretty silly.

Any thoughts on either of these methods over the other or insight on making the green screen
overlay work? If I can, I gain control over the audio environment and it also makes the project
much simpler.

Thanks
Rob


EDIT:
The GS method reminds me of the news channel sets where you see people outside, supposedly through their window.
 
Last edited:
I'd have thought the greenscreen method would work well, so long as you can get the lighting direction of both the plant background and foreground interviewees to match (the combined footage may look unnatural otherwise)- and of course if you can light the greenscreen properly to generate a clean key, not always easy if you haven't done it before or don't have the lighting needed.

As you say, sound would be the main reason to shoot greenscreen, especially if the plant has machinery etc unavoidably running during the interviews - trying to record voices against that would be a nightmare. (The live plant sound may still be useful later though, turned very low just to give some background atmosphere under the interview voices).

You're having trouble with the blur? - try different amounts of blur, and also see if you have a 'de-focus' filter which gives a subtly different effect. And I guess even deliberately shoot some plant footage slightly out of focus, to avoid any need to add blur filters.
 
I did a few talking head interviews years ago in a similar fashion as to what you're trying. I was going for a stylized look so it worked for me, might not if you want to go for realism but...
What I did was mask the faces in order to blur the edges of the head - from the ears back and under the chin - to blend the overlay with the blurred background. Pretty simple really.
 
OK, I am definitely going green screen.

Logistics from a hazmat perspective are dictating this as the method.

Regarding the problem I had with my first test, I think the biggest problem was the
background being shot with an inferior camera, compared to my HMC40. I think that having
the footage shot from the same camera will be crucial.

I think I also need to do better at lighting my subject. With the HMC book in hand, I have a
better understanding of setting exposure and how to use the historigram to check the
greenscreen scene before shooting.

clang: I appreciate the tip on defocus. I think I have something equivalent in Vegas Pro.

rsbush: what do you mean by "mask the faces"? Were you blurring the faces of the subjects?
I can't visualize what you mean, yet. What did you mean by stylized? Can you describe it a bit
more?

Many thanks!
Rob
 
What I did was duplicate the layer, on the top layer, mask the face and feather the mask to taste. Then on the layer beneath add my blur and a bit of noise so the blur doesn't appear too smooth. Stylistically it was somewhat of a cross between a shallow depth of field and tilt shift.
 
Last edited:
Make sure that the scale of the plant footage is believable too. I would probably get a few takes of different camera positions and zoom percentages to give you some added flexibility.

I also agree with deliberately shooting the plant footage out of focus. Once it's on video, it's 2D, you can't selectively blur things that are far away more than things that are close, which is what happens in real life.
 
Thanks.

As I have been working on pre-production, another question has come up. If I am interviewing someone on set, where should we be looking? I can't believe I haven't given thought to that yet.

With interviews, is there a rule of thumb? We will likely both always be on screen together, standing side by side.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top