Lighting experiment

When we were filming our green screen shots, we decided that we should experiment with lighting as we were unsure as to which ways would cause more shadows, or more lighting on the actual screen rather than the male. During this video you can see that we had used the same background (which will also be the background for our final piece as the sky is very dull and negative - creating a negative feel to the male) for all of the shots, but we have used different shots in which the male exits the shot via the left which will also feature in our production. We decided after looking at these one after another on this video that if we do not use the overhead lighting, then the two side lights appear stronger and affect the whole shot - resulting in too much light being attracted to the sides of the green screen and making the purpose of the green screen effect less effective. Therefore we decided we must use the overhead lighting to stop this effect happening. When looking at the two side lights, we tried different positions of the lighting. For example, if you look at the image you can see that there were 2 different positions for each side camera. We mixed these combinations and tried them all to see which one was most effective. For example, we used the Side Lighting A at point 1 whilst Side Lighting B was at point 1 also, we then changed it so that Side Lighting A stayed at point 1, but Side Lighting B was now at point 2. We then did the opposite of this, so there was a total of 4 combinations when regarding the side lighting. We decided on putting Side Lighting A at point 1 and Side Lighting B at point 2 as we found that it did not create a shadow when the male exited the shot and it also meant that the male did not look too discoloured from the 'Oh me, Oh my' shots either. There was also the issue that with too much lighting on the shots, the male sometimes turned translucent and we could see through his arms and shoulders. We then decided to mess around with effects on the Mac and we lowered the contrast levels which effected our short green screen lighting experiment as he was no longer translucent, and the colours were much more vivid. Therefore we believe that this experiment was extremely beneficial as it meant that we could get the best out of our green screen shots and it enabled us to use the green screen effect extremely effectively.

Another way that the shadows could effect our piece is by them occurring because of the actual green screen. For example, if the fabric is not crease-free then there is an issue of shadowing happening because of the fabric itself. However, whilst exploring the Mac we found out that we can crop green screen shots so that only part of the green screen shot is shown. For example, looking at the screen grab you can see that by moving the four circular points you can cut out the parts that you do not want. For example, (referring back to our original green screen experiment) we had the top corner which had shadows and did not 'green screen' well. However, we now have the ability to cut these errors out of our production, therefore if a part of the shot has not worked as well as we had hoped and the male doesn't go near that section we can cut it out and make it disappear.