Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Large Green Screen shoot

Jordan Buck

Jordan Buck

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 6, 2013
Messages
284
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Location
London, UK
Hey Everyone

I am off on Thursday to Abu Dhabi to shoot a large green screen setup - Full football team - fake stadium, two shots one of the full team standing there with a semi circular dolly move, and one dolly up with one player to a logo on there football shirt.

I have done some fairly normal green screen stuff but nothing on this scale before - 25" wide.

I have sat down with the gaffer and come up with a pretty good lighting list thats got us covered - some 18K's maxi brutes etc.

But I just wanted to see if anyone had any tips or watch outs when working with very large VFX setups, any seasoned advice would be welcomed, I am comfortable doing the shoot and in my ability but with a portal of people who are much smarter than me I thought why not ask if it could save me a headache!

Also has anyone ever worked with crew from filmquip in Dubai before?

Thanks!

:cheers2:
 
The one thing that looks like a possible problem is the grass field the player are on, because green grass and green screen don't mix well.
 
With most stadiums the grass isn't too much of a problem for green screen as you can do a travel matte to separate the grass. The only issue this sometimes presents is when characters cross from the matted area to the keyed area. Usually, creating a great key and then using its key status as a luma for a second instance of the clip gets around these keyed color shift issues. If not, then it's a roto.

If you have a move in your shot be sure to use as skinny a shutter as you can to get a crisp key with little motion blur. You can force motion blur later in AE or other VFX platforms.

James is right to watch out for any team colors or props that fall near the green range.

Good luck! Sounds fun.

H
 
James Falco said:
The one thing that looks like a possible problem is the grass field the player are on, because green grass and green screen don't mix well.
Click to expand...
I'll add to that anything green as it'll take too long to edit some times. Also the time of the day is important. If the sun hits the green vertical vs sideways the green will not be the green you want.
 
My advice... do not care to much about the greenscreen.... what is going in behind the players?
Sending the shot of to india for perfect roto is about 1-4 USD per frame... So before you go and get a huge amount of lights and greenscreen do the calculation shotlenght in frames x4 in usd and you got perfect alpha channels for all the players. possibly shoot at 90 deg shutter to get a bit more crisp edge / less motion blur if there is a lot of movement and add another 90 deg motion estimate motion shutter / motion blur in post to tie them to together.

Also if using greenscreen the grass is not the problem actually the opposite as you do not need to care much for greenspill as the grass is naturally reflecting green.

We did this film with no greenscreen... saved quite a bit of money and time and the result I think is even better than if we would have had greenscreen. All shot in one night with only the stadium lights.

https://vimeo.com/84294368

offcourse it´s a bit depending what you need to put behind if the grass is not supposed to be in the shot there is problems with the feet sinking into it. But if you want a fully seated stadium behind them then just shoot and send me a pm most likely we got a CG stadium we can stick in there. :)
 
Thanks for the advice guys - yeah there is talks of outside or inside location - looking like outside for now the camera movement is very simple its just a small dolly move left to right tracking the players.

My plan was to keep some very comprehensive camera notes to give to the VFX team.

The shutter angle isn't something I had initially thought of so thank you very much for that information, it seems very logical and makes sense.

Bjorn - quite amazing what you can do with VFX isn't it - that has given me a lot of hope and thrown a few of my worries away. We are giving them a very good starting point so it seems as though it will be fine!

Im assuming I want to shoot at a fairly closed aperture to give them a clean starting point - I was thinking around T11-16? can I risk going wider on it? Ideally I like to shoot between 5.6/8 not sure how possible this will be as I essentially need to keep 11 players in focus...
 
Avoid getting any spill from the green screen onto your actors. Pull them as far away as possible from the screen to avoid reflections.

And shoot camera charts, particularly for color and framing. Give the VFX person a call and ask if they'd like a grey or chrome reflectivity ball for reference as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top