Setting up the greenscreen
The setup process was very lengthy and required a lot of equipment to be assembled. To make the greenscreen, we used a green fabric sheet which we propped up on different sticks and rods.
Along with the equipment necessary to put up the greenscreen, we also needed some lighting equipment, specifically things like spotlights and diffusers, which each took a lot of time
During this process we learnt a little bit of how people can chance the colour of spotlights using coloured semi transparent sheets of paper.
Then there was the camera, which had a lot of individual bits of setup, such as assembling the tripod and adding some extra widgets to the camera itself. I'm not sure what the model was exactly, but I knew it was some kind of video camera because of the hinging-out screen.
Some of the other things that were used for this exercise included a Clapperboard and the boom mic, which was connected to a zoom recorder, as well as a pair of headphones for the audio person to wear.
The Filming Process
The the basic premise of an Interview, where someone behind the camera was asking questions to a person sitting on a chair in front of the camera about Covid and what they dislike most about it.
In order to give everyone the chance to be in different roles, we repeated the interview many times over with different people being put in charge of directing asking the interview questions, capturing the audio, managing the camera, using the clapperboard, etc.
We also tried to make sure that everyone had at least one go at being on camera and answering the questions, though there were still a couple of people who didn't.
Editing Greenscreen Footage
Audio and Video syncing
The files we were given to edit with were separated into different folders, including one with the camera footage, and another with audio captured from the boom mic.
A big part of the process involved using Adobe Premiere to match and sync up the audio clips and the corresponding footage. When doing this, the main thing we needed to sync between the audio and video was the closing of clapperboard, which was pretty much all we needed to make the rest of the clips line up too.
After this was done, I then went about trimming out some unnecessary parts, using the "sync audio and video" option to make absolutely sure they lined up, maybe adding a denoiser and de-hummer depending on the audio quality, then exporting it with name of the scene number and take.
I was able this with most of the scenes, though it did take quite a while to get done. At the end though, I now had a folder with just the combined audio and video clips.
Now it was time for the main part, which was to organise the clips to create an actual film.
Assembling/organising clips
The first thing I did was to just drag and drop all of the combined clips in no particular order. just so I could properly see what I was working with.
Then I roughly put them in the order of what I wanted to show first, and then began working on removing the greenscreens.
To do this required a few different steps. The first one being to add the crop effect and use the pen tool to set a custom perimeter around the person to cut out. The next was to use the ultra key tool to remove the remaining green parts, which took a little bit of fiddling with the settings to get looking right.
My plan was to separate the footage into different sections for each question, with the question being shown in text and being followed by the answers from each person. Because of this I split up the clips quite a bit and did a lot of moving around. By doing this I felt it would add a quicker and more snappy pace to the footage and make it feel a bit more interesting.
Originally I was only going to change the background according to the question being asked. Before I was about to finish though, I decided to instead change the backgrounds according to the person speaking, then assigned backgrounds to particular people.
While I was working, I was debating whether to add music or not. Ultimately though I had to leave this out, as I felt that it would take too long to find the appropriate music to use.
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