[Bill Davis]

Eric,

The problem is pretty much geometry.

In a small space, the camera to back wall distance is necessarily limited. So you back your camera up to one wall – and open the lens as wide as possible. With small aperture lenses like on the HVX series of camcorders, this means that at full wide, you’ll probably see both the floor and the ceiling. So you’ll push in a bit to give yourself a full key shot.

Then you bring in the talent and the trouble begins. No matter how you light the green screen, you’ll find that to avoid spill on your subjects, you want to maintain as much distance as possible between your talent and the green screen wall. So you bring your talent forward toward the camera – but that act makes the talent appear BIGGER and almost immediately you face the fact that the angle from the lens to the now closer subject means that your field of view includes not only the talent’s head, but an area OVER the talent’s head.

You can raise the camera, but with a 6 foot talent against only a 7′ green screen, you’ll have to both raise the camera AND tilt down in order to keep the talent’s head against the green screen. And this starts to look VERY forced, very fast. It’s just not natural. Plus unless you tilt RADICALLY down, you’re still shooting a lot of what ever is above the talent, ceiling, wall-pipes, whatever.

This is the relentless geometry of short space green screen work.

So, unless you’re talking about seated news desk style shots, a 7′ screen height isn’t likely to do what you want.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Either will do the same thing.

If, however, the “room is fairly small” – whichever path you take will be made more difficult because pulling a good key typically benefits from both talent to keywall distance AND camera to talent distance.

If the keywall to camera distance is less than 15 feet or so – with room to move around within those two limits- you may be disappointed in the size of the key you can easily pull.

YMMV, Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Warning, DANGER.

You say the back wall height is just 7′ from Stage to ceiling???

That’s gonna provide you BIG problems in getting even light on a front lit greenscreen.

You’ll need to get your insturments OUT from the wall to have any hope of evenly lighting the GS – and with only 7″ of ceiling height, a regular human standing upstage is going to cast shadows on the screen.

Think of it this way. If the GS light is positioned at the top of the 7″ wall but just a few inches out from the wall – then you’ve got VERY bright green fading to VERY dim green top to bottom. That’s a horribly uneven light field with massive drop off at the center of the screen. You’d LIKE to see a nice right triangle – best would be a right triangle with the vertical leg equalling the horizontal leg. So the light would be 7 ft out from the ceiling/wall – or floor/wall dimension. But think of how that’s gonna screw up shadows cast by anyone on stage. You can cut your distance out from the wall in half, to 3.5 foot. but then the lower wall key will suffer from inverse/square falloff. So you can try doubling your lights to have one from the ceiling mirrored by one footlight and you’ll probably be OK. But again, you need at LEAST that 3.5 feet out from the back wall totally clear.

But while that will give you pretty good key lighting, it’s still gonna wreak havoc on your shooting angles because that’s just a WAY compromised height for a standing subject.

In my studio, I fight and fight with the fact that I only have 11 feet of overhead clearance – and in a lot of setups, I have to raise the camera and shoot moderately down from the talent eyeline if I want to do head to toe GS work.

In your situation, I’d be thinking a whole nother approach. Possibly a background wall of many fluor tubes – with significant diffusion over them – perhaps those plastic prismatic ceiling tile light diffusion lenses – to spread the tube highlighs evenly over the lit surface, then a translucent key green fabric over that.

Unless I’m understanding this wrong your camera angles will constantly be losing key at the head or floor of nearly all shots. And the further back you move your cameras to take full stage shots, the worse your problem with cut-off key heads and feet will be.

My 2 cents anyway.

[Bill Davis]

Todd,

Based on the photo attached to the OP, I don’t think an arm is going to cut it. Notice the crew worker on the blade near the hub on the right side?

By my eyeball calculations, the hub of the wind turbine appeared to be something like 1000 feet or so off the ground. So even a 100′ cherry picker is gonna be dwarfed.

They have these turbines in the mountains skirting Salt Lake City where I was driving last month. And the SCALE of the beasts is so big, that it’s hard to get your brain around.

Actually, Jeff, I think this might be the ideal kind of job to partner with one of those RC helicopter video guys on.

Fun project, tho.

[Bill Davis]

This is personal, but the MOMENT any vendor or supplier decides that THEY have the right to control the email relationship with me by setting the terms for frequency and/or content of communications – I look for another vendor or supplier.

This is the first step in destroying a customer service relationship, in my view.

My 2 cents anyway.

[Bill Davis]

Personally, Jeff – I don’t think you’re “foolhardy” at all.

It makes sense that some people find this kind of work daunting. Everyone’s different. But dams wouldn’t get built and towers wouldn’t get erected without people capable of pushing aside their fears and going ahead and getting the job done.

I also think some people are just wired not to have this stuff bother them. Case in point, I was at a downtown Phoenix playground with my then 6 year old son – and a kid about his age calmly climbed to the top post of the bars and proceeded to walk – quite confidently – along the top rail. He was a native american lad and I wondered at the time if he was related to those canyonland American Indians who proved to be such exemplary “high steel” workers during the skyscraper eras.

Sometimes it’s just in the blood.

For us “regular” folk, it’s a matter of conditioning. I’ve shot from quite a few towers and cranes and lifts and I’m pretty much OK with it. However, I once tried to freeclimb (no harness) the simple ladder on a radio station transmitter tower on the top of South Mountain here in Phoenix and about 15 feet up, I just froze. Something in my brain couldn’t reconcile going any higher on a ladder that “appeared” to be suspended about a mile in the sky.

Funny thing the human brain.

But if you trust the riggers and are working with a professional crew who understands the safety aspects – go for it. Can’t imagine anything more fun.

As to cameras and particular rigs, I’d want the freedom to shoot as much like i normally shoot as possible. So I’d probably invest in the smallest and best camera rig I could, then bolt it to a short tether to the harness so that it could just reach my eye. Wide lens setting and move close to the action will get you the best shots.

Let us know how it goes.

[Bill Davis]

A few months ago, after a long period of inner struggles, my son came out and announced formally what his mom and I had suspected for a long time – he’s gay.

What a relief for him and everyone else around him. Including both his mom and I who had been telling him for literally years that we didn’t care one whit either way.

I’m reminded that no amount of thinking, rationalizing, hoping, training or planning can change certain innate human realities and that until they are accepted, the path of life is very, very rough.

I honestly believe that being an entrepreneur -or not – has a LOT in common with that.

You are or you aren’t. You either wake up one day and realize that you’ll NEVER be happy unless you’re given the opportunity to sink or swim on your own effort and wit.

Like gay or straight, right handed or left handed, tall or short, if you’re wired to be an entrepreneur you’re an entrepreneur. And you’ll never be truly happy being anything else.

That’s how it was for me anyway.

So the answer is simple, really. If you pretend you ARE and you’re unhappy – you’re not. And if you pretend you’re NOT – and you’re unhappy – you ARE.

And if you’re unhappy either way – you’re simply not grown-up enough to make a grown-up decision.

So let up on yourself and give yourself more time. In the end you’ll figure it out.

“Burnout” is transitory if you’re actually doing what you’re meant to be doing. And after the pressure diminishes you’ll be right back. If not, than that will be self-evident as well.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

While soft boxes work with any speed ring, speed rings tend to be instrument specific.

The Tota speed ring mounts very differently than the speed ring for a fresnel.

Also, while you can easily purchase speed rings for the 650 Arri Fresnels in your kit. The fresnel lenses will narrow the light beam such that it fills only a part of a short softbox like the Chimera. If you want to use softboxes with the fresnels, you need the deeper Photoflex boxes – which unfortunately are much more unweildy and much more “nose heavy” than the Chimera boxes. So I’m not fond of them.

The whole point of filling a soft box with a VERY Broad source like a Tota is that it fills the box FULLY. Not even a DP will do so as well. and Tota’s are small, light, foldable, use affordable lamps – and are generally useful instruments on their own.

I personally don’t like DP lights. They get VERY, VERY hot. (so do the tota’s but that’s somehow more tolerable to me in something that’s so small and easy to carry) DPs start clunky and stay clunky. VMMV.

[Bill Davis]

Plenty of room in case for extras.

[Bill Davis]

Look, this is a dynamic business.
And this is a dynamic question.

If you’re working on storytelling of some form, then yeah, a LOT of stakeholders can’t understand anything other than the near-finished approach.

OTOH, if you’re working on a piece driven by talking heads and cutaway info-graphics – and the client requests a first cut knowing that they haven’t finished the product mock-ups so that all you’re going to have is a series of grey slates with “Insert shot of Widget A here” then there’s little downside to that kind of rough cut.

They get to see the folks on-camera and decide if the VO/performances do the job – AND even an idiot confronting a grey screen with those words will accept that the visual is going to change.

Please remember, this is HARDLY EVER a one solution works for everyone business. JUDGEMENT is a good thing. Use it.