The Life of Reidy

Today in my film class, we really played around with the studio's chroma keys so we can do a most excellent weather and traffic report. It's a pretty fun tool to utuilize in film, but theres a lot of parameters to be worked out. First of all, we don't have a green screen so we have to use a blue curtain, and pull it back as tight as possible so that the wrinkles do not show up in the background. Secondly, the lighting is kind of nightmarish because we have to use a lot of extreme backlight on the blue curtain while at the same time keeping a nice even balance for the actor in from of it.

Then theres the problems with adjusting the gamma difference and making sure the actor appears and the background looks like it is actually there as opposed to being slightly faded. For example, Paul was doing some blue screen work today but he was wearing a blue hat, a sweatshirt with blue writing on it, and he has blue eyes. So basically, we could see through the letters on the shirt, his head looked like it was half cut off, and through his eyes you could see the background image. Kind of funny, but overall unproductive in terms of what we were trying to achieve.

It sure is a lot of work and detail, but hopefully the end product will justify the means.