Green Screen Shoot
Today myself and Janusz met in college, we headed up to the Green Screen room and ERC to collect the equipment around 11:15 in the morning, the idea we both had in mind was to get set up so as the actors could come straight in and we could start the filming process. Unfortunately Janusz forgot to charge the camera batteries last night but we simply put the batteries onto charge as we began to set up the lighting, camera, print of copies of the script to hand, sorted out all of the sound equipment etc ready to begin our filming.
Janusz left me in the room to set up the lighting and camera whilst he went down to reception to meet the actors as they had arrived, once they got to the room myself and Janusz gave them a few copies of the script, introduced ourselves again and ran over a few things. We left the actors alone as we continued to set up the gear, the actors started to rehearse over there lines for the days shoot, giving us time to double check everything to make sure that it was working, I checked back to my previous test shot blogpost to see where the camera, lights were placed in comparison to the green screen, as well as checking the number on the back of the LED panels, 255. Whilst checking the XLR cable with the zoom to test the room noise, through the headphones I could hear a hissing noise, was pretty distracting, I dealt with this in a calm way as I asked Dave from ERC to have a look for us, we tried replacing the XLR lead and changed the model number of the boom mic that we were using, decreased the volume of the mic too which seemed to decrease the hissing noise. Once the hissing noise had reduced I started to set up the sound equipment for Janusz and ran him through how to use it, what buttons to press to record, stop, how to increase the volume for any reason, made sure I was by his side to aid with the holding of the boom pole too.
For this shoot Janusz and myself were a little disappointed that other group members who were to fulfill roles of the sound engineer, lighting engineer and the editing team all failed to show, therefore we had to split these tasks between the two of us; this proved easy as we had the skills between us from previous projects undertaken although there was a time impact. Janusz took on the role of the sound man and director and I took on the roles of the cinematographer, lighting engineer, helped with the sound and helped a lot with the directing of the actors, coming up with additional ideas for Meise en scene throughout the shoot. The fact that we didn't have an extra pair of hands was a pain but we just got on with it, I mean we set everything up ourselves, nothing went wrong throughout the shoot but like I felt as if the rest of the group didn't care at all, so by taking on these extra roles it did add pressure but we were determined to work alongside and with the actors to create an interesting interview piece for both our show reels and the actors to be proud of.
Throughout the shoot I operated the XF100 camera, after every take I played back the material to the actors to check what they thought, whether they would like to shoot another take, and me and Janusz critiqued the shots, what we thought worked well and what we thought they could improve, predominantly relating back to there body posture, the way lines were spoke and how they acted in front of the camera. With all of these ideas, we worked together with the actors and every scene that we shot seemed to improve, become better to a point where the actors were speaking fluently and they knew there character which was great, especially Vicky as the Vicar, felt that she put a lot of expression into her character, the types of hand movements that she gave in front of camera.
I tried to get a variety of camera angles and all the time I was concentrating on how to achieve the shots for Janusz (Director), helping him with the positioning of the boom pole, to ensure that there wasn't any background shadow on the backdrop, I was thinking about any cut away shots which could make the film more interesting and just add a different element to the footage, one of which was a close up of Ellen (Actor) holding a phone up close as she was reading a text from a guy called Nathan, links into the script. Whilst concentrating all the time on the camera angles I was tweaking the light on certain shots to increase the light on there face, make the actors pop out of frame a lot more, however I had to take into consideration that the lighting changes could make the green screen look different in colour, add shadows, anything could change in the frame, whilst making these changed I asked on of the actors to view the frame to see the light change, worked well and they said if there were shadows, determining whether the light needed to be angled differently, lowered, raised, brought back or brought forward.
Once we had finished the shoot, we wanted to make sure that the actors were happy with everything that had been shot, whether they wanted to shoot any last takes or give any feedback on how they thought myself and Janusz had worked, whether they liked the idea we came up with, the way that we had done everything between ourselves, they told us that they were really impressed and that they thought we had done an exceptional job with everything, the way that the shoot ran so smoothly and they liked the feedback that we gave on there acting, carried on with the positive vibes throughout the shoot.
Here are a few shots that I thought should be snapped using my phone, which I thought I could use on my blog as a nice wrap up for the shoot.
Luke and Janusz (Crew for the shoot).
Ellen, Vicki and Izzy (Actors for the shoot).
It was now time to pack up all of the equipment and returned to ERC and head back down to the suit where I would transfer all the footage and sound from todays shoot, this needs to be passed onto the editor but I could have edited it all myself anyway, its not hard whatsoever and the fact that myself and Janusz came up with ideas of how it could be edited together whilst we were on the shoot, they wouldn't understand where the cutaway shots should be positioned or how the lighting changed for a reason etc. Anyway we waited for the group to turn up to collect the footage but no one did and so Janusz has said that he will put the footage onto his google drive so they can get a copy of it, I created folders for both the sound and footage, labelling the camera that we used and the zoom mic H4N.
Myself and Janusz contacted the rest of the group on what happened in todays shoot, I messaged George (Editor) about the types of camera angles that I had used, explained the reasoning why, what I was trying to achieve, the lighting angles that were created etc. I wanted to let him know about what scenes the phone cut away shot was for, I wanted to give him an idea about how it could be edited together, explained that we need a rough cut of the footage for Monday next week, its all in his hands now. We think that we might need to make another trip to green screen room next week to film the last scene with the actors, Janusz us currently working on the last scene, we agreed that the actors would have to wear the same clothes and that we would be using the same set up in terms of equipment, lighting, camera, sound etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment