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jonathan grant

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    Producer
  1. Well, I would agree with you except there are a few things that might save it. One, we never say what season it is. The majority of it was shot in the spring where the weather really was teetering back and forth between chilly and nice. So, the scenes go back and forth between wearing jackets and short sleeves. Pants are always worn, though. Two, this is supposed to be a foreboding house so the dead trees actually work really well. There are some leaves on them but they are brown. So, putting leaves back on the trees isn't really necessary. That helps. We do want it to look kind of dead, but have enough green that it doesn't look too jarringly obvious that it's a different month from other scenes. The sky isn't great, but maybe we can key that out? Luckily the sky is mostly covered up by trees and given that it's a pretty quick establishing shot we might be able to get by with the overcast sky, or hopefully key it out and replace with another sky. I think changing the grass to a greener shade and changing the brown leaves to a greener shade will be enough to sell it. Test audiences will confirm or refute that. The biggest problem is that there's just so much of that brown in the picture!
  2. Hmm, I'm not sure I understand. I've never used fusion before. I tried it again today and the change to color tool isn't working well at isolating the color. :-/ I tried making it a color that I could key, but that didn't work either. Here's a screen grab from the scene. http://i1.creativecow.net/u/78565/deadgrass.jpg I tried masking just the trees and doing a change to color on the leaves to make them a little greener. That worked okay, but it made a noticable difference on the treebark. There's just way too much pale yellow in the scene, it's everywhere! I was able to get a workable looking color using curves for the grass, but I had to mask just the grass and there's too much spill over onto the actors. Besides, the mask just doesn't quite look natural in certain areas (like where the grass meets the trees and the building in the back.
  3. We actually had good response from the change to color in that it isolated all the grass, the problem is getting the right color. If what we were going for was to make the grass look like fake neon easter grass, then we did great! lol But, we want it to look like spring/summer grass (which looks different than fall grass). I'm just not sure how to make the color look right. Anyone familiar with the change to color effect? We could use another effect to change the color, but we'd have to mask around the actors walking on it in each frame which would be a nightmare to get to look right. Maybe we could try keying out the yellow grass and put a duplicate layer underneath with the color correction?
  4. In our film there is one scene shot in March where the grass is mostly dead, so it's that dead yellow color. We need to make it look like summer grass. The actors walk across it so we were playing around with after effects "change to color". It isolated the grass really well, but we can't figure out how to make it look like the right color. No matter what we try it looks like fake neon easter grass! You'd think it'd be as easy as choosing the right color in the "To:" box, but it doesn't look anything like the color we choose. Sometimes the darker the color we choose the lighter the color it becomes. I'm not familiar at all with this effect. Any suggestions on the best way to turn dead grass into summer green grass? (without having to manually mask out every frame of the actors walking across it)
  5. I shot a movie in 24pA and edited it in adobe premiere in 24p timeline. Then exported it to avi using the default settings. I assume this avi is 24pA (it won't play in windows media player without flickering really badly, you have to play it in a dvd playing software for it to play correctly) I need this avi converted to digibeta. The production house doesn't know how to do a 24p avi to digibeta. Is there anything I need to know? Can they just import it into a timeline and export it digibeta normally? If so, what kind of timeline do they need to import it into and what settings do they need to export it with? I tried importing the 23.98 avi into a 29.97 timeline and exporting it but it duplicates every 5th frame no matter what I try and thus looks very poor. I'm desperate and don't know what to do! It exports to DVD wonderfully with the 24p and looks great. So it should be able to go to digibeta in some way right? Is there another format I can send a digital film without having to compress it? Another kind of tape? Thanks so much!!!
  6. For the record, there's a place where you can get them for under 3 dollars a sheet. http://www.lightingelstore.com/servlet/the...rrection/Detail If I had to get 3 of the CTOs and 3 of the CTBs which should I get? Which would I end up using most of the time? the 1/4, 1/2 and full?
  7. Is there a place to get cto and ctb gels online? How much do they typically cost. I found one set online for over 100 dollars. That can't be right, I've purchased gels before and they were less than 10 dollars (from a theatre supply store)
  8. I know you try to have the actors well away from the background, but sometimes we don't have a choice because the room is too small or we are limited by the setting. How do you light a scene where the actors are just a couple of feet away from the background? P.S. On a side note, is there a rule to the minimum actors should be away from a background? No less than halfway between the camera and the background?
  9. Yeah, but sometimes we don't have that luxury :-/
  10. Thanks guys. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on online about lighting basics. We'll be almost exclusively lighting people and most of the time a little more open shots in general (as comedy usually is) which means there needs to be room to move without messing up the lighting. That presents some problems, obviously. What are the most common setups you face (the most common problems)? The one we came up with and probably will a lot is a smaller room where the actors are forced to be fairly close to the background. To have enough room to get a somewhat open shot the actors are forced close to the opposing wall. This is a nightmare and we couldn't figure it out.
  11. I didn't think that would happen, but the guy who originally lent us a lighting kit didn't want us to use the dimmers because he was afraid they would short them out or something. That didn't make sense to me, but just wanted to make sure anyway. We're using someone else's lights now. :)
  12. So you are from Edmond huh? Small world! We will be filming a lot in Edmond. I'm from Norman but the other two producers are from Edmond. Thanks for the help guys! Exactly what I was needing. :)
  13. Okay, we have that basics. 1ks 2ks some smaller lights I think, a couple of softboxes, some cheap work lights w/ dimmers. We need simple nice looking lighting set ups for our TV show which is a comedy, shot on locations mostly (sketch comedy/short films). What I don't want it to look like is youtube videos, but a little more cinematic. I understand the concept of 3 point lighting, but we struggled to light a simple house scene right (just a living room). Problems with the fill overpowering the key, bad shadows all over the place, problems getting light on the background without spilling on the actors and/or without making the background looking very unnatural. Please help!!!
  14. In my first film I had to use a cheap lighting set, i.e. worklights hooked up to dimmers. They worked great! Now I'm in preproduction for a TV show and have access to a for real lighting set with 1ks and 2ks. But I really miss the control I had with the dimmers. Can you plug the lights into dimmers or will it make them blow up or something? I've never seen lighting people use dimmers with them but I much prefer having dimmers. Is it okay to do that or is there a reason why they don't do it?
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