Digital News Unit: Pre-Production - Green Screen

 On Friday we got Fergus to teach us setting up the green screen and how to light it up.

We're choosing to use the Baseroom as it's a small enough space to film in and set up a smaller green screen as opposed to setting up a massive one when we won't be using that much of it. 

Myself and Fergus set up the green screen and we all moved the chars back so there was adequate space.

Next Fergus opened the blinds as he said natural light doesn't leave harsh shadow as it's everywhere and is of course the most natural of light. 

However there were only windows on one side leaving a shadow on the unexposed side, this resulted in Fergus closing the blinds and using the lights in the room. Luckily the lights were quite natural in themselves: giving off a white a very light-blue shade. This meant half the work was already done: the lights had evenly lit the green screen which is a key thing you have to make sure of otherwise you end up with different shades of green and that makes keying it out harder. I chose to sit down and pretend to be the presenter for the sake of getting the framing and lighting right.

All that was left was to get some even lighting across my face. Fergus said that to simply aim the tungsten light at me would leave very harsh shadows on the areas the light didn't hit and also make my face far too bright. This meant we needed to dissipate the light to make it softer. We could reflect it off of a reflector or use a filter. 

Fergus chose both. Since the tungsten light was giving off yellow we needed to cancel it out so he stuck a Dichroic daylight filter on it to make it a nice white and more natural light.

Filter was still on the light when the photo was taken.

Fergus then tilted the tungsten light, also known as a redhead, to face the ceiling: the white tiles reflected the light back down onto me and dissipated it to some extent allowing a softer light to hit me.

Fergus left us to get used to the setup and we filmed a test with me pretending to present.

It was a good test as I learnt how best to light someone up using reflections and filters. I also learned about Dichroic filters are very useful and how to set up a green screen. All of this, to me, was valuable information as someone who wants to be a director: it can help me to set up a scene easier knowing how I can light up a person in different ways.