To prepare for the big filming project over winter break, our Media Studies class did some preliminary tasks to sharpen our skills and get ourselves familiar with filming. Chiefly, we experimented with editing and using chroma key.
We thought we would do a horror chase scene, with a few editing techniques in use to help establish an atmosphere. We set off with filming. I was directing, and my classmates were responsible for the camerawork and the acting. Our original idea was to try making a seamless transition through a door, and to stitch two takes together into one, à la one-take movies like 1917 (2019). However, when editing, we found that it was impossible given what we had already made - instead, we tried doing a 180 shot, which was much better for preserving motion. Another problem we faced was the lighting - we filmed in the middle of the day, with bright light clashing against horror conventions. So, I tried to add the night filter on my video editing program, but it was very artificial and probably not of much use to us when the natural lighting is so bright in the shots. We also took a while trying to perfect the quick pan in the second shot, and dollies to help us track our actor.
Here is the chase scene with the night filter on. You can see how artificial it looks, and why we opted not to use it.
Here is the final chase scene with the night filter removed.
Our green screen project was much more straightforward. We made some footage on a green screen - of note is how bright the lighting was on us, and our blue ties which made it very difficult to get the chroma key working.
Sadly, with my video editing software (VEGAS Pro 15), the chroma keying did not work - I couldn't find any way to pinpoint a color that would work with the lighting that we had, but my classmates had better luck on programs such as iMovie.
Here is the original green screen footage, unedited. You can see that the lighting is extremely bright, which we should have toned down. The colors look washed-out, which may be the fault of the camera. All in all, it looks pretty bad, being a combination of multiple issues with our equipment.
Here is the best result I could get with VEGAS Pro 15, using the settings for chroma keying
shown to the right.. It was difficult to pinpoint an exact shade that would have cut us out, and due to the lighting, some of the colors on us were similar to the colors on the green screen. This ended up making us look ghastly, which I could only fix by adding an absurd amount of blur, which, at that point, made the footage look even worse. Furthermore, the green screen color changes, which means that towards the later parts of the video, much of the green screen can still be seen. In the finished result, the darker something is, the more it's cut out by the chroma keying. When it's black, it's fully cut out.
However, my friends did have better luck on other editing software, as mentioned before.
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