SHORT: Philosophical Thoughts From a 7-Year Old

R

RyanEsta

Member
Hello fellow filmmakers!

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I am extremely excited to debut my newest web series, Philosophical Thoughts From a 7-Year Old! In this series, Wesley tackles some of the biggest philosophical questions that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time. The definition of beauty, aliens, and death are dissected in Episode 1, which you can watch below:


I shot this web series using a Panasonic AF-100 which I recently acquired (this is the 2nd project so far that I have shot with it). This was a different sort of challenge for me since I have never used a green screen before, so lots of learning was had along the way.

A more detailed behind-the-scenes post to follow shortly!
 
So the idea for this series came after meeting Wesley (the kid in the film). I thought it would be interesting to hear his ideas and thoughts on big philosophical life questions, but present it as an ultra-serious, Discovery channel type show.

I recently acquired a Panasonic AF-100 (an upgrade from my Panasonic HVX-200) which I have pretty much fallen in love with. I shot a few other webisodes with it but nothing on this sort of scale. This is also the first time I have used a green screen, which I knew was going to be a bit tricky since I live in a small 1-bedroom apartment. I purchased a fairly cheap 10 ft. x 12 ft. Green Screen + stand package from eBay, and although I can tell it is definitely not the best stand in the world, it got the job done and the green screen seems pretty solid.

Here is a basic diagram of how I laid out my lighting setup with the green screen:

lighting.jpg

For my two green screen lights, I used 800w halogen soft boxes from around 2-3 feet away I would estimate. For my subject lights, I used two 500w LED lights for most of the shoot, although I experimented with these lights and angles: in one shot, I dimmed them a bit and but the right one on the floor. For another shot, I believe I aimed one high and turned one off altogether. I did this to give it a bit more of a moodier look to make it seem more mysterious.

Although not pictured in the diagram, I used a 400w halogen softbox overhead light that was slightly behind the subject, about 3-4 ft. above him. This was essentially used as a hair light/backfill light. So in total, I had a 5 light setup, 3000 watts in all.

For the lenses, I must admit that I am still building up my lens collection (since I never had any for my HVX-200). For this project, I used the Panasonic 14mm-45mm f3.5-5.6:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IKLJV4/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00

It is definitely on the slower side but it will do for now until I purchase faster prime lenses.

One tip/hassle with using a green screen is getting that thing wrinkle free! I initially ironed out the green screen but it still had wrinkles. I used a steamer to try and steam most of them out but, even with wrinkles clearly visible, I was able to chroma out the green correctly in Final Cut (which is what I used to edit this).

Using Final Cut for this piece made chroma keying super easy. After importing the clips into Final Cut, I simply dragged the Chroma Keyer over to the clip, selected the range of green and luma to key out and it was pretty much as simple as that. One thing that was new to me for this piece was using the 3D Boris Text Generator (found under Video Generators on the Effects tab in Final Cut). Figuring out what each setting did definitely took some time to learn and rendering the text took a great deal of time as well. But I though the results looked great and much more appealing than the standard text generators. The big advantage with using the 3D Boris Text Generator is the ability to adjust independent settings for every single character, which is what I loved.

And of course, coming from a background as a musician, I did 3 pieces of original music for this series. The music was definitely crucial for giving it that ultra-serious feel, especially the beginning symphony piece. I should also note that I used a Rode NT-2 shotgun mic for the subject.

So yeah, that's the background on how this came to be. Please let me know what your thoughts are and if you have any questions! Thank you for watching!
 
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