Today was a standby day for work, so I got to do some pre-production stuff.
Yesterday I downloaded Pinnacle Studio Plus v.9.3 trial edition, which is good for 30 days. It has some nice features for a $99 program; I found out it does chromakey, so I decided to give it a trial run.
Chromakey (in case you don't know what it is) is when they film someone in front of a blue or green screen, then using some kind of digital magic they insert something else into the screen. Whenever you see a weatherman in front of a weather map on the wall, he's using green screen and the map is added digitally. That's why the guy is always looking off to the side, he's watching himself on a monitor to see if he's pointing to the right area. See? Told ya it was cool!
Anyway, I reserved the camera for today from the studio, and did some shooting there in front of the green screen. John, the technical manager there, showed me how to use the lighting board, and he helped light the set, so now I'm checked out on the studio. I did about five minutes in front of the green screen. Then I took the camera a shot a bunch of exterior scenes here in Milford.
When I got home I fired up the Pinnacle software and did a few chromakey scenes, like me standing on the hood of my car as it drives down the street, or a big building with me looming over it, and I even downloaded a picture of a weathermap and did the weatherman thing, which probably looked the best out of the three. In some of the images there's a green outline around me, but I think I can filter it out when I get better at the program.
Oh, and I spent more money this weekend, too...I ordered a Kenko (think "Cheap-O") Wide-Angle lens for the GS-70 Panny camera. It's a .45X lens, which is roughly a two-to-one reduction in field of view. It was only 25 bucks including shipping, which is WAY cheap. So that means I'm not expecting miracles or anything...I just hope it works!
Thursday Anthony and me are doing some more test shooting, and we'll finalize our pre-production tasks for "Death Knocks", and start looking for actors. Things are happening at last.
This is starting to get fun!
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