During our consult this week, Paul floated the idea of our final product being a bunch of small experiments, rather than the three,  more polished scenes we were originally intending on making. With this is mind, we decided to use the Thursday class to shoot in front of a green screen, something none of us have done before.

Initially, the most challenging part of shooting in front of a green screen was setting the thing up. Paul had recommended we hire the pop-up green screen, so we could set it up anywhere we liked. Trying to attach the stupid thing to the stands was impossible; we ended up just clamping the screen to the poles using the gaffa clamps. We then found that the green screen was too small, and that we wouldn’t be able to get any decent shots with it. So we gave up and returned it to the techs.

Next we tried shooting in the green screen room, which was about 6 million times easier and more fun. After an initial struggle with the lighting in the room, we were able to get a bunch of great shots of the entire group, as well as some individual ones.

I spent the next little while putting some backgrounds into the shots. The process was a lot easier than I had anticipated, the hardest part being finding the best animated loop to install as the background.

Here is crappy GIF I made from the final Green Screen shot in our stoner circle scene

This has week has by far been our most productive yet. We have a schedule, we have scripts, we have an idea of what we want to submit as our final product. We actually shot some footage and edited it as well. For me, the main thing that I have taken away is that planning, organisation and motivation are more important than anything else. It didn’t matter that we’d never used green screens before, or that we were daunted by the task of editing the footage; starting the process and making time to finish it meant that we got it done.