Green Screen Test: Backgrounds and Bullets

I’ve just uploaded a new video, some basic green screen background replacement tests I’ve been playing around with the last few days.

Shot on the Canon HG10 with the green screen set up in the sitting room; I was on my own so had to keep it simple with the camera set up on the tripod. I only had one construction light so it was pretty difficult to key properly after.

The first shot was the easiest, adding the alley to footage of me walking on the spot and then playing with the scale and position to add some movement. The second shot took a while to get right, my first attempt was scraped after I got well and truly lost in 3D & time.

Attempt 2 went better, but you’ll notice as I raise the gun at the start that it disappears briefly, I spent hours trying to adjust things so that wouldn’t happen. I’m told it’s not my fault… it’s something called inter-frame compression on the camera. I’ve had Sla explain it to me a few times and kind of understand it but if I tried to explain it then my head would explode.

The next problem I had was timing the movements of the two separate clips of me with the background as the camera follows the bullet. Once everything was in sync I added the muzzle flash and the bullet hit. I did some very basic colour correction on the whole thing and added the bars, some sound effects from iLife and music from Garageband.

The first version of the shot was sped up by precisely 715% (thanks Sla) to get the fast whip and the second shot plays at the speed I put the whole thing together but appears in slow motion thanks to a nice bit of sound design, once again thanks Sla.

Finally, after explaining inter-frame compression several times then cleaning up my speed and sound issues, Sla added some colour grading in Magic Bullet.

Overall, it was good fun and better practice and as always comments, feedback or advice are welcome.

Irish Blog Awards 2010 – Net News Nightly – Blooper Reel (Video)

Out-takes from the Net News Nightly sketch for the Irish Blog Awards 2010 featuring Ken McGuire and lots of bad language. Enjoy!

Irish Blog Awards 2010 – Net News Nightly (Video)

The 5th annual Irish Blog Awards took place in Galway on Saturday and here’s the Net News Nightly video sketch myself and Ken McGuire threw together to be shown on the night.

Ken had asked me weeks ago if I was interested in throwing something together for it but with the run of ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ we had forgotten about it. With the play finished and the awards looming we met up on Tuesday afternoon to brainstorm ideas. Most of the afternoon was spent drinking tea and coming up with dead-end scenarios, all we knew for certain was that we wanted it to focus on the highly debated topic of late “Blogging is Dead!”.

The videos had to be sent on Friday so given our time constraints we needed to keep it simple, opting to go for a single set-up news bulletin with everything shot on green screen (giving me more practice in After Effects). We met up again on Wednesday for the shoot in my sitting room. The main problem was a lack of lights, Ken brought a double-headed construction work light but only one of the lights worked; I used this to light the green screen and used my small desk lamp to light Ken. It wasn’t ideal but we were working against the clock. We shot the whole thing in about 20 minutes with Ken as the Net News Nightly reporter and me as the terrorist leader responsible for the death of blogging.

The opening sequence was put together using a royalty free graphics sequence and music from the iLife collection then I added the animated titles designed by Ken. The background behind Ken is another royalty free graphic sequence, the green screen removal is a bit rough but that’s simply because of the lack of lights. The riot footage was pulled offline and Ken designed Sky News style overlays which I added to the entire sketch.

With the rough cut assembled, all the backgrounds replaced and the overlays in place, we added the finishing touches with the scrolling bar at the bottom displaying retweets from Twitter about the death of blogging and finally a completely random image of a cat and a laptop to finish Net News Nightly; your daily internet news… nightly!

I’m told there was a great response to the video at the awards on Saturday night, having missed the session this year I’m already making a plan to go to next years awards and hopefully we’ll put together another video for that too.

You can check out all the videos from the night here and you can see the list of Irish Blog Awards 2010 winners here, well done to all the winners.

Turn Around! (A Short Film/Special Fx Test Shoot)

Following on from my first special effects test shoot, The Game, I was eager to try shoot some bigger effects stuff, this time collaborating with evil genius Dave Minogue to produce another short film/special fx test shoot; ‘Turn Around‘.

Myself and Dave have talked about working together for quite some time, we’re currently working on scripts and fleshing out ideas, but we were both eager to just get out and shoot something quick and simple. I have a growing list of effects shots I want to try out so we decided to try shooting somebody getting hit by a speeding car.

The first attempt was pretty much a disaster, shooting in an industrial estate on a Sunday afternoon, the weather turned against us and the battery on the camera began to die in the middle of shooting. But more importantly, the car-hit effect itself was awful. Given my lack of green screen or After Effects I had to be able to create the effect in Final Cut Express 4, the first attempt involved reversing footage to make it look like the car was speeding towards me and it just didn’t look good enough.

The second attempt went a lot better, although the weather continued to be a pain in the ass on the day making the continuity of shots a bit rough. We started by shooting all of my sequence in the car park, running through “my lines” and then me reacting to the car hitting me. Then, using the same set-up, I cleared the frame and Dave drove the car through the shot.

Whilst the sky provided an awesome cloudy backdrop in the shot, continuity would prove a problem later when I tried to put the shots together for the car-hit effect. For anybody else trying it, I recommend using a background that will not change. There was also the problem of cars moving from the parking spaces behind me and poor sound due to the main road beside us. But we didn’t worry too much about it, that’s the joy of test shoots.

As we began shooting the car sequences we had to move quickly as the weather got worse, meaning most shots had one take. Dave insisted on being beside a lake polishing his car so we shot that first. This sequence is the only one shot on my Canon HG10, using my MiniDV Steadicam to track in for Dave’s dialogue. Everything else was shot on a Canon XA H1 (thanks Sla). We’d pick a spot of road, I’d set up and Dave would drive by, then he’d turn around, pick me up and we’d move further down the road and repeat the process until we made it back to the car park. Then we shot the car interior.

When it came to editing I began with the effects shot; using the master shot where I turn and react to the speeding car then cropping that shot, matching it with the shot of the car so that it all happened at the same time. I pulled a screen shot from FCE and using Photoshop I removed a still image of me reacting from the background. I then replaced the background with green and imported the image back into my timeline.

Then it was a matter of replacing myself with the still image, just as the car hits me and chroma-keying out the green in the image. Then using key-frames I moved the still image with the car as it drags me out of the frame, adding motion blur to the still image to make it blend in. I deliberately kept the framing of this shot pretty tight, standing near the edge of frame so that once the car hits me it all happens very quickly.

The only problem was that in the time between shooting my reaction to the car hit and the shot of the car speeding through, the clouds had changed dramatically in the background. Once the car entered the frame, it caused a ripple as the skyline jumped from one shot to the other. At first I attempted to crop the shots but it was still noticeable. I then tried to use key-frames to move the crop as I moved and the car moved but again it was still too noticeable, as the crops created little boxes around myself and the car.

To solve the problem (like all my editing problems) I asked Alan Slattery, who gave me a crash course in “nesting”. To be honest I don’t really know how to explain the process but it involved pulling sections of one skyline and layering it on top of the effects shot to eliminate the changing clouds. To add more movement to the still image of me being hit by the car, we distorted the shape of the original green screen image and then added it a couple of frames into the effect; the result gives that impression of me buckling and hitting the bonnet of the car.

I added some sound effects to add to the viciousness of the impact and used a royalty free orchestral flurry as the music used when Dave is driving. It’s a bit repetitive (the loop is only 13 seconds long) but I think it adds something funny to the whole thing.

I sat in with Sla as he worked his colour correcting magic and then used Magic Bullet to add a cooler look, bringing up the blues along with the contrast and saturation. Having viewed ‘The Game‘ on several different monitors over the past month, I noticed there was quite a big difference in the overall look, depending on the computer I was using. In some cases, the footage was a lot darker and a lot more saturated so we were careful not to over do it this time.

As always any feedback or criticism are welcome (bear in mind that this was a practically improvised test shoot) with the emphasis more on the effect at the end than the dialogue making sense etc. If anybody has any questions on the effect then feel free to ask.

Also check out whatsdaveminogue.blogspot.com for Dave’s version of how the shoot went. We’ll soon be getting to work on our next collaboration. But for now, please enjoy: ‘Turn Around!‘

South – ‘The Making Of Insula’ Episode 1

South – ‘The Making Of Insula’ Episode 1 is now online… finally! After 13 weeks of stressing and working on the series, I can’t wait to hear what people think of the first installment.

Episode 1 begins as the recording sessions began; back in April on the first day in the Mill Studio, as the lads from South set up their gear. The mood was giddy and as they got everything ready; Daw tried to get his head around the idea of recording himself playing the drums. The first few days of recording focused on the drums so when editing the footage it seemed natural for the first episode to go that way.

As with the two upcoming episodes; this episode pays particular attention to an individual song, in this case, the previously unheard track ‘Downpour’, which will appear on South’s upcoming debut (out July 31st). I don’t know how many times I’ve had to listen to this song, it doesn’t really matter because I don’t think I can get tired of it, but when cutting the music-video sequence together I kept it to a fairly basic cutting style in comparison to the episodes that follow. At this stage I must also point out that the music used is not the final mix of the song, you’ll have to wait until the album comes out on July 31st, but it’s an awesome sneak preview.

As my first completely solo-project, it was difficult to come to terms with trying to do a two camera shoot on my own. I had to constantly be thinking the cuts in my head; with the Canon XAH1 (recording on tape) set up on a tripod to capture my master shot of each instrument during each take (and using the manual focus to get some nice pick-up shots in between), whilst always moving around getting cut-to’s on the Canon HG10 (recording on hard drive) mounted on my steadycam. The result was a hell of a lot of coverage that needed to be synced and then chipped away at.

Now that it’s finally finished I’d like to say thanks to the people who helped along the way; firstly thanks to Thomas, Ken and Daw for the opportunity to join them and work on something together, our time together in the studio was so much fun. I know it can’t have been easy to constantly have a camera in your face but thanks for not pulling a Christian Bale every time I moved a light or a flash went off in your face!? Having watched all the episodes with the lads during the week; I’m delighted to say that they loved them and I’m looking forward to working on music videos and the tour in the coming weeks.

I also have to say a huge thank you to Alan Slattery; for providing me with equipment and constant technical advice throughout the entire process. From frantic phone calls because I thought I broke his camera on the first day; because there’s a stupid button on the side that appears to have the only function of: making a camera act broken!? To solving the problem of each camera recording in a different codec through tape & hard drive. Right through the endless questions: how do I do that? What’s that yoke? I pushed this and now what’s happened? How do I make it do that and then turn everything inside out!? Thank you Sla and thanks for the colour grading that made everything look awesome in the end!

If your reading this then, please take 10 minutes to sit back and watch South – ‘The Making Of Insula’ Episode 1. As always comments would be greatly appreciated and don’t forget Episode 2 goes online next week and if you’re on Twitter then don’t forget to follow South for updates and news (and let them know what you think of ‘Downpour’).

The Game (A Short Film/Special Fx Test Shoot)

For the past few weeks, I’ve found myself devouring any information I could find concerning editing & post production techniques, special effects and shooting using a green screen.

The reason being that I have a lot of ideas for scripts, particularly some action movie style shorts, but I wasn’t sure I could pull them off, given that they would require certain effects. I wanted to do some test shoots, the first of which resulted in the above improvised short film of sorts; ‘The Game‘.

Over the course of the past month; I’ve slowly taken over a corner in our kitchen, gathering bottles and containers, funnels, hoses and lots of red food dye. Most recipes for fake blood require corn syrup and as of yet I still can’t find a place that sells it. So I did a few experiments and despite a couple of failed attempts, I finally made a batch that looked realistic enough, at least for a quick head-shot which is one of the first things I wanted to test out.

With everything ready to go for the effect, all I needed was a victim and with nothing better to do on a Sunday evening, I asked Daw if he wanted to drive me out to Jenkinstown Woods and get shot in the head!? How could he refuse!? We drove to Jenkinstown, picked a suitable location and spent the next two hours being devoured by flies!

I wanted to try out some other effects as well, namely shooting ‘day for night’ but unfortunately I picked the longest day of the year to give it a try. The sun was shining late into the evening meaning the effect wouldn’t work properly, and the darker I made it in post production the more I lost my head-shot effect, which was the primary goal of the test shoot.

Instead of just shooting the effects, I wanted to piece it together into some sort of short film, not just a static shot with blood flying. The fun part was that it was only a test shoot, it didn’t have to make any sense whatsoever and there was no point in going for more than one take.

So we started with some running shots, I also wanted to try a sort of visual delay effect but it didn’t quite work out for me so I scrapped it in this case, it needs more planning. Shooting on a Canon HG10 on a miniDv steadycam, we shot the running stuff; the long grass proved quite tricky to run through, if I wasn’t falling over then Daw was, or something as simple as a long blade of grass could push the counter-weight and ruin the shot. Once the two of us were truly sick of running we moved onto the dialogue.

Given that there was no script, we quickly made up two lines of dialogue to help explain the preceding effects; not that they make any sense but that was kind of the point of them in the first place!? I shot Daw’s closeup and then he shot my closeup. For the two shot I simply put the camera on a tripod. Then we shot the C/U of my hand as the gun, I did bring a fake gun but thought it was funnier if we didn’t use it. And finally we shot the head-shot effect.

With the camera on the tripod and Daw in position, I hit record then moved in place kneeling just out of frame beside Daw; counting “3,2,1,BANG”; he let his head fly back and I sprayed the fake blood onto the tree behind him. After reviewing the shot, we didn’t even bother going for a second take, I had what I needed.

Once I had the footage roughly assembled in Final Cut Express 4, I added three pre-generated digital effects; the muzzle flash from my “handgun”, a burst of blood from Daw’s forehead for the initial impact just before his brains ejected out the back of his head onto the tree and if you look really close at my fingers after the headshot you’ll see some whisps of smoke before I throw the weapon away.

With the effects in place, the next step was colour correction; given that I spent no time worrying about lighting during the shoot there was some noticeable differences in shots, beams of sun light were constantly coming and going through the trees. I cleaned it up as best I could then transferred the rough cut to my editing mentor Alan Slattery; who showed me the wonders of Magic Bullet; general post production techniques & colour grading.

Losing the idea of “day-for-night” and instead playing with the levels of green in the footage for a “House Of Flying Daggers” style of colour grading. To top it off and give it a more film like feeling, we added letterboxing to 2:35 and changed the frame rate from progressive to inter-lacing.

Following that, I found suitable music, using the royalty-free jingles that come with iLife and before I knew it the test shoot was looking more like a short film than I ever expected it to. It’s my first successful SpecialFx test shoot and given that this was shot on a budget of say… maybe €20 for blood ingredients and materials, it certainly won’t be my last. I get the feeling things are going to get very gorey over the next few months.

As usual comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

For best results watch ‘The Game‘ in HD.