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Lightning up for the blue screen wall
Hi!
I’m not sure if this is the right place to post, but I was going to key out my shots in AE anyways.
I’m going to shoot on blue screen for the first time. What kind of light do I need, and where do I put it?
I guess what I have to do is to make sure the blue wall gets enough light, and that there will be no shadows, but what about the rest?What I’m going to do is too shoot people standing still in different positions (making face expressions and small moves) and then cut everything together on a white empty space as a background (characters moves from right to lef). It’s for the introduction on a short film.
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2 Replies
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You might want to hit the Cinematography COW with your question.
But basically:
– your talent should be far enough away from the screen that no blue light bounces back from the wall and hits them. If it does hit them, you’ll have to remove the blue, and there’s the risk that they will now match the blue of the screen in some areas.
– the wall should be lit to become an even blue from side-to-side, well-saturated so a computer will see it as pure blue with as little gray as possible.
– even if the wall is pure blue, it must be lit so the camera and AE sees it as pure blue. If it is lit darkly, it will be seen as blue-gray, and there’s a great risk that there will be some blue-gray in your talent, especially if they’re wearing jeans.
– if the far edges aren’t perfect, don’t worry – you can always draw a mask around the talent to cut out those areas, but you don’t want to have to mask too closely to the talent and animate the shape of the mask (much) as the talent moves.
– it doesn’t matter what kind of light you use, as long as it allows you to get the even light that I described.
– shoot test before you’re under the gun. Doing otherwise is foolish. If you can’t shhot a test, get someone who has shot bluescreen before, or at least, take some time beforehand and have a laptop with AE on set and try to key the footage there.Anybody else?
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In addition to all of Steve’s great advice…
You can try adding some yellow in the backlight to minimize the blue spill. That’s especially true if your talent has to be near the screen, although keylight can usually remove a good amount of it.
A waveform monitor will be indispensable if you want to achieve good results. As a rule you will like to match the levels on the back wall to that of your key.
As Steve mentioned even lighting on the screen is one the most important aspect, as well as keeping shadows out.
And even though it’s unrelated to lighting, it’s never said enough, stay away from DV !
Cheers,
Vince
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