Camera work and lighting

The Green Screen

Filming news is a lot like filming the documentaries. However working with green screen was more difficult than it might have seemed from the first thought. First of all the green screen must be evenly lit and, as we learned in our green screen workshop, there has to be fixed distance from the green screen to a person. Even though we seemed to light Michael pretty well, he moved few steps back and ended up blending in with the background. and so on our actual shoot we had a bit of tape that showed where the news reader should stand. That helped a lot with bothe the lighting and framing as the other thing I've learned is to make sure that the news presenter is in the middle and that the shot should be either a close up or a wide (unless theres a desk). Also, it made me remember to check that the camera was leveled with the readers eyes as during our workshop it was just a bit lower.
To light our set we used 4 lights, 2 for the background and 2(key and fill) for the reader.

Handheld

For our 'live' we decided to go handheld as it looks more authentic and allows more movement, rather than just staying on a two shot. However we mesed up a little by shooting handheld while introducing the location, as it wasn't neccessary.

For the live we had 2 lights (and the lights that were already there in the gaming centre), one light on one person an the other on another. Other than our 'live' was pretty dificult to film as the artificial light that's in there made everyone a bit green and not having things well lit made it harder to focus the camera.

Interview

The interview was pretty easy as I remembered everything from filming our documentary, the difference was that this time we had reverses and idealy I would have liked to have lit Lauren, but she insisted not to.
For this we pretty much used the same set up as for our green screen, just lowered the lights lighting the person to his level.

Comments

Influences DOPs and the genre

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Evaluation

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