Sometimes you need to shoot something dynamic and colorful, but you have very little time and zero budget. Often the solution is to try and shoot on greenscreen and pull a great composite later in AfterEffects. But that can take a lot of time and effort in order to create a well-shot and well-composed effect. Pulling a great chromakey takes tons of effort and practice. What if you don't have that kind of time, or expertise, or equipment?
You go old school. When I first saw the end result (after the jump) I was really impressed with how clean his greenscreen keys were. Turns out they weren't keys at all! The shot above was done entirely without a greenscreen or compositing software. How..?
My friend Sandy Thailing created this shot using nothing more than a white paper background, a video project and a laptop. He simply projected a motion background loop out of the laptop, through the projector, and onto a large sheet of white paper. Then he lit his subjects using basic three-point lighting, used some flags (large solid objects that keep studio lighting from hitting the background), and started rolling.
Check out the video here to see the effect -
Simple, elegant, and extremely effective. Also, extremely old-school. This is exactly how they created many shots in hollywood movies before greenscreen was even possible.Except the didn't have laptops and projectors!
This technique is extremely effective when you need to shoot LOTS of interview footage and you're having to create an "edit-by-committee." It allows you to bypass the AfterEffects process altogether, saving you hours and hours of render time.
So give it a shot sometime soon; you may be impressed with the results.
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