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Green screen lighting conundrum 2015
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Buy 12 cheap 4′-0″ shop lights from HOME DEPOT and fit them with KINO FLO 3200 tubes. Hang them overhead and on the side walls …. leave them for the entire length of your shoot (Your time is too valuable to load-in/load-out/re-light for every shoot.
Buy matte green chromakey #VFGF262 GAM Floor, lay it in and leave it.
https://www.gamonline.com/catalog/gamfloor/index.phpRent 2 Kinos/stands to use a front fill for each of your shoot days. MY choice would be Parabeam 400’s (but 200’s might be enough).
This is dance, you don’t want a lot of frontlight. Sidelight and top light is what models form and is the best angle for dance.Have fun with it.
DS -
It’s very unlike me to disagree with anything Dennis would ever say. I’ll concede that Dennis is a lighting expert of the highest level… and knows at least, oh, a thousand times more about this stuff than I do.
That being said, I’ll disagree with a little bit of his advice. 🙂
Firstly, you don’t need 12 of those shop fixtures (unless you want your talent to look like they are standing on the surface of the sun). You just don’t need nearly that much for such a tiny greenscreen space. I’d say four, maybe five of them, tops. Very likely two across the top and one on each side is more than enough. I regularly light a greenscreen that is just about this size, and I use three shop lights to do it… and even then as I said sometimes I only use one tube in each.
Secondly don’t waste a dime on Kino tubes for these fixtures. If you were using them to shoot talent, yes… but just for greenscreen washing its totally unnecessary and would be hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Accurate color temps are virtually meaningless when you are only using them to wash the greenscreen.
Dennis’ advice isn’t bad, but he comes from doing very high-end projects with available budgets/resources/fixtures that I suspect would put most of our projects to shame. Some suggestions are just waaaaaay overkill unless your project is very high-end, which I suspect it isn’t.
All that being said, his suggestion of permanently installing these instruments for the shoot duration is right on the money.
His flooring suggestion is also a good one. That stuff is not all that expensive when you consider what it does for you.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Late to the party as usual (I am), and I should say I “never” disagree with my friend Dennis and only “seldom” disagree with Todd, but in this case I believe we’re watching an episode of the “King’s New Green-screen”.
The whole plan is doomed by the design criteria that 4-5 kids, and then it seems the filmmaker/dancer in addition, so five people will be dancing in a room 12′ wide”! This is physically impossible.
I have 12×20′ screens (blue and green) and wouldn’t attempt to shoot four moving people against it. Furthermore you need additional space left and right of the screen for lighting.
The only way I could image this working would be to use all three walls in the set, but again the size constraints will limit your ability to light properly and separate the actors from the set walls.
What is it that you want to out in the composite background? Will you even be able to create a “matching” light quality that will make a convincing composite. This is a primary concern in the design of an effect like this.
Even without knowing your answer, I would suggest that you use the practical walls, and perhaps paint and/or prop them appropriately, keep them in the dark as much as possible and let the action play. Is it not the dancing that is the subject of your project?
If I were doing this and money was no object, I’d cover all three walls in LED panels and program various effects or even actual background the light the dancers at the same time (with just a touch of ceiling mounted front light.
JMHO
Cheers,
JS
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If I were doing this and money was no object, I’d cover all three walls in LED panels and program various effects or even actual background using the lights to back and sidelight the dancers at the same time (with just a touch of ceiling mounted front light.
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Just for fun, imagine shooting three independent groups on the tiny set, one at a time…. then using masking and positioning tools, compositing them into one large group on a synthetically WIDE artificial set. Using the song and beats for synch.
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“The whole plan is doomed by the design criteria that 4-5 kids, and then it seems the filmmaker/dancer in addition, so five people will be dancing in a room 12′ wide”! This is physically impossible. ”
“Just for fun, imagine shooting three independent groups on the tiny set, one at a time….”
The kids are aged 8-12 (grouped by age). There will be 4 or 5 of them but no filmmaker in addition (I’m not really going to paint myself blue and join them, tempted as I am!). We can choreograph specifically for the small space so tight groups should (I hope) work. The songs are 2 minutes long so we can film them multiple times. We can split the kids into 2 groups to comp later, and maybe even film them individually for lip-sync close ups. The songs are insanely catchy – they will haunt my dreams for years.
Dennis, that GAM floor stuff is very interesting. Does it have enough rigidity to work as a cyc on its own? Or would it need curved support underneath? I’m assuming the latter as it squeegees on, but it would save a lot of time and hassle if it will curve smoothly from wall to floor.
“Rent 2 Kinos/stands to use a front fill for each of your shoot days. MY choice would be Parabeam 400’s (but 200’s might be enough).
This is dance, you don’t want a lot of frontlight. Sidelight and top light is what models form and is the best angle for dance.”We’ll hopefully have 2 Kinos for front fill, probably not parabeams though. What would you use for side lights? We’ll have access to 3 x 150 watt Dedolights but I’m assuming they won’t do very much – although we can use one as a spot for individual close ups. And having said that, those Dedo 150s put out way more light than I expected. And of course when I say side light, I mean the lights will be against the wall, a couple of feet in front of the dancers. So diagonal light.
Oh I’ve also got a colour-variable LED that I’ll mount high above the green screen to add a touch of magenta backlight.
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I have found that I have to turn on my camera’s clear-scan feature to “dial-out” a flicker created by my LED PAR can light.
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ANDY ….. You can NOT use GAM FLOOR to create a curve …. but if you have a hard curve you can use it to cover the curve. Think of GAM FLOOR as “contact paper”.
Regarding my excessive (???)use of shop lights (12), I was actually being very conservative. I only want you to use the 12 shop lights, NOTHING ELSE. Stop thinking about PARs and Dedos. I wouldn’t even use any Kino frontlight (and would only keep the Parabeams as a CYA). If I did use them, they would be as “footlights”.
I’ll clarify:
+ use 4 @ 4′-0″ from overhead (2 in the downstage “in 1” position, 2 in the upstage “in 2″ position)
+ use 4 @ 4′-0” mounted on the stage left wall — 2 in the downstage “in 1″ position (one low, about 6” off the floor, one above it), 2 in the upstage “in 2″ position. THIS IS YOUR SIDELIGHT from stage left (camera right).
+ use 4 @ 4′-0” mounted on the stage right wall — 2 in the downstage “in 1″ postion (one high, one low underneath it and about 6” off the floor), 2 in the upstage “in 2” position. THIS IS YOUR SIDELIGHT from stage right (camera left).As I said earlier, lighting dance is all about modeling and enhancing the 3 dimensionality. The sidelight is VERY important — and essential. I’m saying to ONLY light your talent AND THE GREENSCREEN with these 12 lights.
My priority would probably be the sidelight. Those 8 fixtures are KEY lights.
The 4 overhead fixtures are essentially to fill in the greenscreen and help separate your dancers.
Think of your little box at the end of the room as a refrigerator …. open the door (turn on the camera) and reveal the contents — in an all encompassing wash of light.
As for the Kino frontlights … use them IF — and only IF — the shadows on the front of the dancers bothers someone’s parents. But even then argue for NO frontlight. If you must use it do it from the footlight angle.
I repeat …. have fun with this, and don’t treat it like it’s an interview with some CEO.
DS -
Change the room.
The only good thing is that it is deep. It’s not wide enough, though. Your dancers will not even have 12′ in which to dance. They will have to be far enough away from the green screen so that it doesn’t in essence become a light source on them, creating troublesome edges for your keying. It’s been too long since geometry class for me to give you a number, but I’m guessing your “stage” will be about 8′ wide tops.
Thanks for the post – anytime someone can get responses from the people who’ve weighed in already, I learn something.
Bob C.
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“I was actually being very conservative. I only want you to use the 12 shop lights, NOTHING ELSE.” Ha! OK thanks, I didn’t get that.
“Think of your little box at the end of the room as a refrigerator …. open the door (turn on the camera) and reveal the contents — in an all encompassing wash of light.” Lovely description. I once filmed something from inside a fridge (not joking). I didn’t appreciate how easy my life was back then.
“The only good thing is that it is deep. It’s not wide enough, though”
I’m in Hong Kong and rent is astronomical here. The only places we found with more space were either way outside the budget or really grotty – fine for us, but not for filming kids. We tried photography studios but 12 foot seems to be a standard width here. Every (affordable) studio has a 12 foot wide cyclo with a foot of space either side. That would have given us a bit more room but we would have had to set up the green screen and take it down again 12 times.We can use the length of the room to our advantage though, speaking of geometry. We can put the cameras far back and go for longer focal lengths to flatten perspective. I’ll test it this weekend. A 70-200 on a super 35 sensor should give us enough reach. I’m hoping we can get 8 to 9 feet of useable width. I think it will be fine for the younger kids. For the older kids, if it’s not working, we will have to split the groups and comp them together in post.
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