Intro to The Making of: Easter break: 6/4/18: Green screening:

set for the green screening.

Near the end of the easter break I went into Media City to begin my green screen element of my video essay and brought in my perfected zoetrope design and script for todays task. Though my instructor John was late we were able to set me up and I picked up my stopmotion camera and was about to set to work. However another technician Shaun told me the stop motion DSLR camera wouldn't be of any use for this, and I explained this was due to the limitation of first year student requirements.  Thankfully he was generous enough to book out a special film camera for this task, but seeing as how I never used this camera before I decided to get some guidance in using it. He

explained the basics in recording the shot with the record button mounted on top of the microphone in the camera.

I felt confident in using the camera, however seeing as how I was doing this by myself I knew it wouldn't be an easy task as I kept walking back and fourth after every shot I took. Thankfully however I could edit out those issues in Premier. I did have one difficulty though in doing my first few shots and that was saying my lines. I couldn't have my script on display since I wanted to make it look professional, but the fact I was stuttering in my lines was an even bigger issue and I had to keep doing the lines over and over. To help me get a more positive result I

decided to do some rewriting to the script to prevent any stuttering. I had remembered a historical significance for animation as in Achient Egypt they had carvings on walls that depicted movement in their stories.

Prepping the lantern.

I added this to the script along with a reference to ancient greeks. In the scene meant for the stone age cave setting I decided to add an element that I remembered from our induction to green screening. I asked a technician to aid me in installing a lantern with orange and yellow paper to create a fire light setting for the next scene where I would be standing inside a cave showing how Animation like art originated from walls in caves. He installed the sheets of clear plastic into the lantern and dimmed the lights slightly. The camera shot was a medium close up showing only the top of my head and chest but left plenty of room for my zoetrope to do the spin. However in the filming process making the zoetrope spin was difficult given the time it would need before the transition,  and in the scenes between frames.

Other scenes were sitting down in the chair such as explaining Walt Disneys history as the frame would have a framed image of him as I talked about him. I felt that my acting could use some refinement rather than acting as a robot for most of my essay. In scenes were I introduced the clip from Looney Tunes I decided to walk out of the scene saying "roll em" as if I was giving the signal to roll the clip itself.

The camera tape soon became full after so many attempts at the scene and it was time to unload the film onto the computer then transfer them to my pen drive for later editing. I felt I needed guidance in this matter so I asked Shaun to help me. We connected the camera to the library computer and began transferring my work. However there was an issue, and that was the space on my pen drives as work from other modules was taking up a lot of space, so whilst Shaun was working on a solution I freed up some space. We looked over the work on Premier and I was only interested in my better scenes, and we found that we could delete scenes we didn't like on the camera itself via the controls on top of it.



This was small enough to fit onto my pen drive and edit later on. I then recorded the remaining few scenes in the green screen room. The remaining scenes were saved in green screen files for me to work on later. Looking back I felt I did good work today in the green screen room and got the footage  I would need for my module. However there are some areas that I could improve upon. One of which would be me speaking the script and have cards to help remind me of certain things. In hindsight I realised that this sort of operation was a team effort and I was having difficulty doing so many things at once. I should've asked some members of the group to help me in this task if they were available.

I would think that I should've learned my lines at home the nights before so that I could easily remember my lines and not stutter so much.



In conclusion I had many areas to improve on but given this was a first year module I would learn from my mistakes and remember this for the second and third year in the event I use green screen again. Otherwise I would think I've done significantly good work for my essay.

In future I shall see if any members of the group would be willing to help me record footage for my green screen elements and rehearse my lines before hand so that I would know what to say and when to say it.