Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/13405
The Keys to Shooting Greenscreen prowess,” he says. “The Flames, the Nukes, the plug-ins… those are the things that have evolved.” Recently Fulks and Grace & Wild were called on for a commercial introducing new Money Match instant tickets from the Michi- gan Lottery via agency SMZ. Shot with a Red camera, this spot promotes three different tickets — one yellow (worth $20K), one blue (worth $200K), and one green (worth one million). In the piece, individuals from different walks of life are pictured with backgrounds representing the different colors of the cards. “The director [Anthony Garth from Grace & Wild shot this Michigan Lottery piece on a redscreen because the spot’s main colors were green, yellow and blue. sional-perspective-based set.” A WINNING TICKET Flame artist/senior editor Tom Fulks, of De- troit’s Grace & Wild (www.gracewild.com), has been working in this business for 30 years, and says the basic rules of working with greenscreen have always been the same: it’s all about lighting and separation. He, like the others we spoke to for this piece, is happy about the developments in software. Having access to a large amount of adaptable keyers has made his life eas- ier. “What’s changed is the technical Avalon Films] wanted to shoot on white,but I convinced him, with some help from the agency, not to,” explains Fulks.“After viewing audition tapes of the older people with white hair, the client looked at me and asked,‘Can you key that off of white? My answer was ‘I really can’t. I need a color back there.’” Because two of the prominent colors of the spot were green and blue, Fulks decided to shoot on redscreen — Grace & Wild has its own 140x108-foot stage with 220-foot hard cyc.“Everybody was cool with that be- cause it was the complete opposite of the colors we were going to use — yellow, green and blue. Unfortunately there is red in skin tones and red in yellow, but it gave me the separation I needed for hair and things that are more difficult so I didn’t have to roto- scope. Rotoscoping never looks good with hair — you need to get that separation.” To hammer home his point, Fulks men- tions that two-thirds of the actors were ei- ther wearing all green or all blue.“We didn’t have time to paint different screens and change them out, so we used red as the base color for keying. It’s not optimum. I still had to do a lot of work on it, but it’s a hell of a lot better than white.” Thanks to the keying capabilities on these systems, shoots are not limited to green or blue anymore, says Fulks. “Flame has a bunch of keyers, so I can go in and do a lot of things. It’s just getting as good a separation as you can from the background to the foreground.” A big reason the one-day shoot went smoothly was because LA-based DP Peter McKay knew how to light for redscreen. “Since most skin tones are the same shade of red, what Peter and I did together in light- ing was try to get as much separation as we could,” says Fulks.“Maybe over-lighting a little bit of the skin so it would pop more so I could do more of a luminance key.” www.caldigit.com Edit One Edit Two Edit Three Graphics Audio CalDigit SuperShare A New Way to Share. Serious Storage. Shared. The CalDigit SuperShare is a revolutionary solution to the traditional SAN. Based on direct connect PCIe technology, the CalDigit SuperShare is an extremely fast hardware solution that allows users to access a pool of shared storage simultaneously. This effective collaboration makes sharing CalDigit storage solutions easy, fast and affordable. CalDigit Storage The strengths of the CalDigit SuperShare Affordable - More affordable than Fibre SAN solutions. Longer Cable Lengths, More Bandwidth - SuperShare 20Gb/s, 100M Laptop Support - Allows users to use laptops in the SAN network. ASTT - Active Sustained Transfers Technology in a SAN solution. Cross Platform - Mac, Window & Linux can access the same storage. No Expensive Host Adaptor Required No Latency, No Conversion 22 Post • July 2010 www.postmagazine.com VFX