August 10

Video Production Techniques: Creating Your Reality

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If you want an awesome video of your lead singer walking along a mystical, foggy, steaming river with dramatic orange lighting, you have three basic choices.

  1. Find such a river and go shoot there
  2. Find existing footage of such a river and green screen your singer onto it
  3. Re-create the entire river yourself

If re-creation is your choice, you have a lot of work to do. If you can find such a river, it’s bound to only be mystical and foggy at dawn.

foggy river

Do you want to shot everything at dawn? You do know the light will be constantly changing as the sun rises, correct?

For practical reasons, it can be most efficient to stage the scene you desire.

MAKE IT LOOK LIKE MORNING

If you choose to re-create it, instead of the sun, you’d need all your lights grouped together like they’e one incredibly bright source. Use orange color gels and lower all your light stands, so the light strikes your singer at a 90° angle.

Place your fog machine, so the light hits the fog from behind, or the fog will hardly show, no matter how much fog your machine cranks out. Fog needs to be back lit in order to show well on film or video.

The same is true for smoke or rain; it must be back lit to show well on camera.

alfred hitchcock psycho movie

An interesting tidbit of film history is an easy way to illustrate this technical fact. During the filming of the movie Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock tried to take advantage of a real rainstorm that came up unexpectedly.

He rushed his crew out to shoot in the rain.

He had to trash that work and re-shoot, staging the rainstorm and taking the time to place his backlights first!

After all, you need your audience to see the rainstorm, and as real as wet shoes were to the folks doing the filming, no rain showed on film, so it might as well not have existed. (The other lesson here is that even the masters make mistakes.)

Of course, the savvy producer has a few more options for the singer-on-the-mystic-river look.

4. Send one poor sucker out to get the river footage at 4:30 am. Green Screen your singer over sucker’s footage. Give the dedicated photographer with muddy shoes a day off! Inexpensive

5. Animate the mystic river, Green Screen your singer over your animation. Go wild with imagination!   Can be terribly expensive.

Whether you re-create the world in a sound stage, on a hard drive or simply take advantage of what exists outside your window, it pays to know what makes things look the way you want them to look. That way, you can more effectively transfer your vision from your brain to a video screen.

I hope this article helps you create the video you desire!

Lorraine Grula, Internet Video Gal


Tags

movie making techniques, video making techniques


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