Massive AE greenscreen project... done. Whew.

[Michael Carter]

85 shots, every one keyed. Sets created in photoshop and AE. 4 months of shooting and post (in between paying gigs).

Not intended to look "real", we wanted it to be somewhat "off" and over the top. Huge learning process for me. Lots of fun though, the shoot days were hard - but man, there were times things ground to a halt because the cast & crew was laughing their butts off. "You want me to do WHAT with that sausage????!".

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

85 shots, every one keyed. Sets created in photoshop and AE. 4 months of shooting and post (in between paying gigs).

Not intended to look "real", we wanted it to be somewhat "off" and over the top. Huge learning process for me. Lots of fun though, the shoot days were hard - but man, there were times things ground to a halt because the cast & crew was laughing their butts off. "You want me to do WHAT with that sausage????!".

Yeah, I'm waiting for Subway to have a girl sandwich option... but even the Wife, who is usually negatively impressed with cheese girls in bras shots... like a few of the ideas... naturally not the cheesy bra shots...

One question she had though was how were the crowd shots, shot... bunch of people on greenscreen then composited in... or did you have some other 'stock' clips...

 

[Michael Carter]

The crowd shots were done in June, I threw a milestone-ish bday party for myself and in the afternoon I set up a 20' screen in the driveway, and put the camera on top of my SUV. Had 60+ people in the house and on the deck. Once everyone was good and liquored up we lined 'em up and hit the playback. We juggled people around between takes, and did some jumping up and down, some with fist-pumps and hands, got a lot of plates.

It was really kind of cool, big party of great friends, shooting 'em for the climactic scene, really made my night. Plus this was a "family" project - I grew up with "Samee Skumn" (and played literally thousands of gigs with him over the last 25 years, since high school dances when we were 17 to bars, bars, bars). My wife is the "punk rock mom", our drummer from all those years does theater in Seattle and flew in to play the dad... my son and his best friend crewed it, and then headed off to Austin for their first year of film school. Samee's son is now an AMAZING hard rock drummer in Dallas - he programmed the drums for the song and crewed as well, and he shot a ton of BTS. Style-wise it's not the kind of project I love, but it was a blast and we really laughed our asses off during the shoot.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

I would be interested in seeing some 'half screen' comparisons betwixt unkeyed greenscreen and the keyed version, if they are easy enough to generate.

 

[Michael Carter]

I've got a few, we set some aside in case we do a BTS clip.

We shot this in a 2000 sf yoga studio room (my wife teaches there and I do their marketing, got a huge room for free). Ceilings were only 9 feet high though, made it very hard at times. I used a 15' DJ truss initially to make rigging back lights and lighting the screen easier - but it just got in too many shots so we ditched it.

The "runway" was painted on 9' wide seamless paper, took a couple hours; I used static-cling plastic on my production monitor screen to get the perspective close (I had made the setting in Photoshop from stock photos and traced the image onto the cling film, worked pretty well):



The crowd at the concert was shot at my birthday party in june, had about 60 people all liquored up and shot multiple plates in my driveway - camera was on the roof of my SUV to get the perspective correct.


A photo from the party setup:


I shied away from using green seamless for the floor in many shots, but it keyed pretty well; wish I'd used it for all the floors, I had to add some really funky shadows in many clips.

In the above shot you can see the frame we made to stretch the screen - sort of an "S" shaped channel that screwed to drywall anchors and gave us 9' tall, flat plywood strips to clamp onto. Worked really well, and kept us from having to clamp the screen to pipe or stands, which always seem to add wrinkles. 30 minutes with a garment steamer and it stayed taught for several hours.

DV camera grab - I left a couple old camcorders around for people to catch footage of the shoot - we used Westcott Scrim Jims for diffusion, had a lot of unbleached muslin for bounce, used two and four bank biax flos for most key lights, plenty of fresnels from 150 - 750 watts, and a 1K leko.