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Chromakey DIT
Jonathan Zuck • November 2, 2019
On Set Chroma Key...on a budget
We were asked to help out with a green screen shoot for an upcoming feature film involving a 500ft Platypus wrecking havoc in LA! Fun premise but obviously lots of challenges.
When you're trying to integrate live action figures into background plates, whether 500 feet or 5 inches, it's important to keep a record when shooting the plates of the height of the camera, the angle of the camera and the lens used so that you can replicate that as closely as possible when shooting your green screen footage. With that information, you want to shoot your green screen footage at the same angle but calculate the height as a percentage of the actual size of your character. So if your actor is 1/10th the size of your character, you want to shoot from 1/10 the height from which you shot the plate, and at the same angle, to get the right perspective.
Of course, this is indie, run and gun film making, and there was no VFX supervisor on hand while shooting the plates so no records of lens, height and angle! So we had to calculate camera height and angle from best guess and memory from 4 months earlier! So we tethered a laptop to the camera and ran photobook software, DSLRBooth, that was capable of live chroma key. In this way, we could determine if the camera height and angle on our creature looked right, rehearse the blocking and camera moves, all before we hit record!
We grabbed stills from the background plate and made them chroma backgrounds for the photobooth software thereby allowing us to determine the right height and angle for the camera. Of course, this isn't the same as connecting to the Unreal engine and doing the real time work they're doing on the Mandalorian but when there's a will, there's a way!
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