Sixth Day of Filming

Green Screen

The main focus of this day was to film in front of a green screen. We purchased a green screen on Amazon for about £6. We wanted a green screen since we had the idea of intermingling all of the different time periods in a dance section during a section of the song which has no vocals. It was crucial that this was done on a green screen since each time period had to have the same background so that there was some consistency holding each shot together. We decided upon a white background since a plain background looked better and white offered a nice contrast to the character where black may have blended in with some of his darker clothing.

Shooting in front of the green screen was fairly simple, especially since the camera was not to move throughout the process. We did, however, encounter some difficulties. Firstly, the green screen was shipped folded, meaning there were creases that needed to be flattened out in order to get the background looking right. Usually, in the industry, a rig would be used to support the green screen, stretching it out and removing any creases. We could not use a rig since one was beyond our budget so we simply had to try and stretch the screen as much as possible before attaching it to a wall with tape. In a moment of poor decision, we attempted to iron the green screen in order to remove creases, but quickly stopped once we melted through a small section of it. Luckily, this section was in the corner and could simply be placed on the floor out of shot.

The main issue we had when filming the dance section was the dancing itself. Our choreography was, in truth, lacking and this was not aided by Ryan's inability to dance or lack of flexibility. We wanted to use dance moves which represented the character in each time period (hence the Saturday Night Fever thing going on in the above picture), however our lack of knowledge in regards to dance moves meant we were left to improvise, knowing only the types of actions we wanted for each character (for example, we were aware that we wanted the 1970s character to act more eratically than the others).