Green Screen Practice

In today's lesson we decided to practise using and editing with the green screen to make sure that we understood all the techniques and adjustment tools. Although we practised with the green screen in our AS piece, we decided not to include it in our movie trailer due to it not fitting in with our narrative. Even though we didn't plan to use the shots in our A2 piece, we decided to use the balloons so we could gain a perspective on how well they would look on camera. Before we started filming we adjusted the lighting so that the balloons looked bright on the camera, we also looked at the different light filters and how they changed the look of the lights. We decided to make the shot simple, with the girl playing with the balloons. Whilst filming I made sure that the camera stayed on the green screen, as the white walls would have effected the editing of the shot. I remembered this was important as last year when filming with the green screen, the background we edited on did not look as professional as there was a small part of the white wall showing.

Once we finished filming we imported the clips onto iMovie so we could begin editing. Once the clip was successfully onto iMovie, we dragged it down to the editing section and cropped the parts we didn't want to include. As we were only practising editing clips, we decided it would be more effective to edit a shorter clip, this allowed us to add more effects. I already knew how to trim clips, so this step of the editing process was very quick. We then experimented with the different enhancement tools; such as the colour and lighting of the clip. We made no changes to the audio, as there was no background noise that posed a problem; such as traffic or noisy people. This is something that we faced in our AS portfolio, as we did a lot of our filming outside, therefore we had to be aware of our surroundings.

The next stage was to choose a background for the clip. We clicked on the 'maps and backgrounds' options at the side of the screen and scrolled through the choices, we decided to choose the stars as it was a fun background to match our props. We clicked on the stars background and dragged it down underneath our original clip. We then went to the option at the top of the screen that allows us to activate the green screen. Once we had clicked on this, we chose the green screen option which brought up the star background behind our original clip.

 Once our background was in place, we changed different lighting and shading settings in order to gain an understanding on how they change certain clips. We also altered the length of the green screen clip so that it fitted perfectly with our original clip. This is something that affected us in our AS portfolio, as our music that we had created on Garage Band did not completely fit with our shots. This affected how professional our opening scene looked, therefore in our A2 production we plan to make sure that all our clips and audio tracks fit in well.

As we plan to make our music video as fun and creative as possible, we decided to alter the speed in order to make the clip stand out. We decided to put the clip in slow motion, and we also reversed the clip as this will also make it stand out to the audience. We decided that after making these changes, the clip looked more creative, and fitted in well with the message we were trying to portray. This led us to decide to include slow motion shots in our real production, therefore the green screen task has been successful and effective in aiding our knowledge on the different editing tools. 

Overall the green screen activity was useful as it allowed us to spend time looking at the different editing tools and how they work on the clips. It was also important as through our research of popular music videos it is evident that the ones people enjoy the most are ones with memorable editing techniques. Therefore it was important that as a group we understood how the editing techniques worked so that our video fulfilled to its highest potential.