Outer Space AstronautsHow-ToLights, cameras, green screen
Inside Outer Space Astronauts
Lights, cameras, green screen
On the day of shooting, I spruce up our bedroom and haul in the equipment. My bedroom is the only room in the house that has enough space to light a green screen and the actor, without any echo (my living room has tall ceilings). I set up the portable green screen against the far wall and set up a small 500-watt halogen work light.
I then squeeze in a chair between my bed and armoire so that it's stationed in front of the green screen. I then place a TV tray in front of the chair for the actor's script and a glass of water. I set up the high-definition camera (Panasonic HVX-200) on a tripod in front of the chair. The tripod is a special one because it allows the camera to be tilted 90 degrees. I shoot the actors with the camera tilted to one side because all I'm shooting is the head, and I've learned that people's heads are more tall than wide, so I zoom in and get the best resolution to work with, in high-quality 1080p HDTV.
I have another halogen work light at work behind the camera, this one with two 500-watt lamps on them on an adjustable stand. I run a clip-on lavalier microphone over the actor to record the sound. The actor wears kelly-green t-shirts in order to match these green screen very closely. For motion-tracking, I take white label-paper and draw two small black squares surrounded by white and I stick them just under the actor's neck, on the shirt.
We then record through the shot list. Great care must be taken to make sure the eye-lines will match up as well as possible, and enough of a pause is taken for other characters to speak in the shot. I really have to concentrate to make sure the tone of both actors in a scene matches well, because we shoot every actor one-at-a-time, sometimes weeks and time-zones apart.
