How do you shoot a tv anchor on the news within a feature film?

Rob Darren · March 3, 2009

How do you shoot a tv anchor on the news within a feature film? Also, the anchor will switch to a tv reporter in the field? Please assist me. I'm thinking about making a background, film the anchor and record it on DVD. Then play it in the shot. I'm using a Panasonic HVX.

Adrian Sierkowski · March 3, 2009

Green screen/tracking is normally how it would be done in order to save yourself from having to deal with the monitors on set which normally will render very blue and may flicker...

CJ Henke III · March 3, 2009

Ok so let me get this straight.

You want to make a mock tv news broadcast and have it playing on a television in the room that your actor is going to be filmed in? Correct?

If so, I know a few ways to do it, but a lot depends on your television, DVD player, and Camera settings. (Also, take into factor, that if you composite the image on the TV screen, lighting will be a factor. (reflection on the glass, or not, are you trying to capture your actors reflection in the screen while they are watching it? etc.) If you have your shots already pre-determined I could give you an exact answer, but in the meantime look into doing as follows.

1. If you have an extra camera, (same forumla works with DVD player), you can record the News Anchor footage with that camera, then just plug it into the TV and push play. However, if you have a tube television, you may or may not get the horizontal lines moving up and down, (test out your HVX on the television first, some TV's work, some don't). The same thing would happen if you recorded the footage and put it onto DVD, but if you are going to do that, test out your DVD player with the TV first while you are recording it. Some dvd players change the HZ rate, or differer based on the connection to the television and, may or may-not cause the nasty horizontal lines. If you have an LCD TV, Plasma, or Computer monitor, in most cases there should not be a problem.

2, Compositing, which I have done before. It takes a little bit more after effects, shake, etc. knowledge to pull it off, but it will look however you want it to in the final version. (You can add reflections and all to the television. Step one, film your news anchor. Step 2, if you have an LCD TV, burn a DVD with a color that you can key out (such as a green screen), make sure to place 4 points in a square to motion track later on. Something such as this

The blue lines in the corner will allow you to determine the curve and distortion near the edges of the television. (You do not have to use this part, unless you need to accurately replicate the edges of the screen).

Then you simply motion track the shot, you can use after effects perspective corner pin for tracking or I recommend obtaining various track points and merging them via TrackerViz

Long - Super Long A** tutorial in three parts:

Part 1: http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/trackerviz/TrackerViz_part01.zip

Part 2: http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/trackerviz/Trac....1_tutorial.zip

Part 3: http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/trackerviz/Stab...ackerViz_01.zip

Download: http://www.nabscripts.com/downloads/scripts/TrackerViz.zip

Visit Nabscripts.com, for more information (in French)

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With that said, any basic knowledge of compositing will greatly help your chances to conserve time and get it done. A simple Mesh warp effect in AE will help to give the composited screen a curve.

3. Just do a cut away and fake the screen around your shot... (super easy), a step above that is compositing the entire TV into the shot, if it's a still shot it's not a problem, but it seems pointless if you just used a LCD screen and played back your footage. A nice DVD set to loop the video would make it easy to film multiple takes.