Last week we were meant to do the media of film Noir however due to unforeseen circumstances we couldn't. This week though we would be doing exercises in the media of Green screening which was what filmmakers use to create CGI or falling background effects in films such as free falling sequences or even showing alien planets in space that otherwise wouldn't exist in the real world or on the sets of films such as the Star Wars trilogy. This was something I tried to do in stopmotion many years ago when I was trying out the software stop motion pro V8 so I was looking forward to this session, not just to see how it's done but to gain some form of insight into this media. To begin the session we reviewed what we researched about Film Noir last week and how it was coined by French critics many years ago and that it was focused on the theme of gritty crime dramas and even old style horror films some images of which freaked me out to the max and gave me nightmares.
In terms of the green screening itself the focus was the lighting in the scene and when applying the background we would be using the software Adobe After affects a software that I was familiar with when I was looking at animating using Photoshop when I learned of its applications in Year 3 Art and Design in College. The tools we could use such as the similar order of layers like we use in Photoshop and to introduce the background we go to the toolbar to the effects option- keying- Key-light this will offer us the option to use a colour picker to select the green in the green screen. The key to a successful green screen was the lighting and when using the colour picker on the green the background would be placed behind the model being filmed, case in point the Van Dam footage that Annabeth showed us as an example whilst amusing and hysterical it did show us how the process is done in After Affects.
This afternoon after our lunch break we went to the studio on the ground floor where we would be doing the green screen exercise itself. We would be shown how to do the process by an instructor who specialised in the method of green screening and showed us some examples of work that he's done.This was a studio used by the media students for news cast exercise in fact we stood in a green screen that was set in a tv studio and when walking it felt like we were interacting with the background itself like the real world when edited. Our exercise would be a campfire scene and I decided to do the exercise as I thought it would be educational and be the good time to show off some of my acting skills even though they were decades old. I was instructed by the instructor to kneel in a position like I was against the campfire and even make it look like that I was trying to warm myself up. To create the lighting effect we used a dark atmosphere and a studio light which gave of the light of a collapsed sun lamp on a truck, it was very blinding. The orange lighting was accomplished using the waving of red and yellow plastic sheets which created the feel of a flame flapping in the night. The software that was used in this was Premiere Pro which was similar to After Affects only more advanced in terms of tools.
I was rather pleased with the results but didn't include any sound effects as I was only trying out the software and techniques to at least get a feel for this approach. Looking back I felt I could've added more to this perhaps some other footage from the file on blackboard that I could use in a much more grouped composition to really test my understanding of the software and its capabilities.
In terms of the green screening itself the focus was the lighting in the scene and when applying the background we would be using the software Adobe After affects a software that I was familiar with when I was looking at animating using Photoshop when I learned of its applications in Year 3 Art and Design in College. The tools we could use such as the similar order of layers like we use in Photoshop and to introduce the background we go to the toolbar to the effects option- keying- Key-light this will offer us the option to use a colour picker to select the green in the green screen. The key to a successful green screen was the lighting and when using the colour picker on the green the background would be placed behind the model being filmed, case in point the Van Dam footage that Annabeth showed us as an example whilst amusing and hysterical it did show us how the process is done in After Affects.
This afternoon after our lunch break we went to the studio on the ground floor where we would be doing the green screen exercise itself. We would be shown how to do the process by an instructor who specialised in the method of green screening and showed us some examples of work that he's done.This was a studio used by the media students for news cast exercise in fact we stood in a green screen that was set in a tv studio and when walking it felt like we were interacting with the background itself like the real world when edited. Our exercise would be a campfire scene and I decided to do the exercise as I thought it would be educational and be the good time to show off some of my acting skills even though they were decades old. I was instructed by the instructor to kneel in a position like I was against the campfire and even make it look like that I was trying to warm myself up. To create the lighting effect we used a dark atmosphere and a studio light which gave of the light of a collapsed sun lamp on a truck, it was very blinding. The orange lighting was accomplished using the waving of red and yellow plastic sheets which created the feel of a flame flapping in the night. The software that was used in this was Premiere Pro which was similar to After Affects only more advanced in terms of tools.
We were shown how the ending video composition was made and much like the After Affects program the green area was selected with the colour picker and the campfire footage was placed within the composition itself and the combination of the darkened footage of me by the campfire and the footage itself seemed to go together hand in hand like what we would see in films like Michael Bay's Transformers series for instance how the actors interact with the CGI robots. Aside from the cramping and near blindness I found the activity rather enjoyable to do and after the break some of us took part in a green screening activity which we would then experiment with for our homework.
The idea being we would film ourselves doing certain actions of our choosing then using either after effects or premiere pro we would compile this with background sketches from our sketchbooks. Grace had certainly gone further in the task when she arrived in a costume for this task, and seeing her and the other students perform was both enjoyable and entertaining to watch.
Some members of the group even brought in props to use such as a Thomas the Tank Engine toy gun which when Ollie and Chris were using it in their piece proved very amusing to watch. If anything this activity gave us the perfect opportunity to show off our acting skills and I could tell that many members of the group were very good at it. When doing my role I decided to go for a beach boy performance since that was one of my backgrounds that I'd scanned for this task and would later put it to use in After Effects. Upon the days ending I felt that I'd learned a lot from doing this exercise and even saw how green screening was done in films and what software was used to accomplish this combination of footage and backgrounds.
20/10/17: After Effects try out:
Whilst waiting to book equipment for stop motion I decided to work on my After Effects green screen piece using scanned in backgrounds and the methods I'd learned yesterday. I went to the Library and opened the program and set to work. However it seemed that I would first need to get acquainted with the software first before doing the composition. I began by importing the footage of me that Annabeth had sent to Blackboard ready for us to use, and so I imported this into a composition and though I followed what I could remember from yesterday I was still having some difficulties doing the activity. To help me with this I looked back at my notes and I was able to do the key lighting trick when doing the composition. To make sure that it was scaled within a time frame I altered the length of the film so that it would show the movement and not have a waiting time frame at the start of the film.
When the background showed through I positioned my footage self on the righthand side of the background and when played it seemed to come together very well. Although I switched the background to a landscape beach scene so that it would look better in terms of presentability. The next phase was to save this as a video so I tried exporting it to premier pro but this didn't seem to work so I decided to try using media encoder to encode it to a quick time format.However when I tried this it didn't seem to work thats when I discovered that I could save it in an MP4 format which was still watchable and could be of use in my documentation blog as shown below.
I was rather pleased with the results but didn't include any sound effects as I was only trying out the software and techniques to at least get a feel for this approach. Looking back I felt I could've added more to this perhaps some other footage from the file on blackboard that I could use in a much more grouped composition to really test my understanding of the software and its capabilities.
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