I am planning on doing a short scene inside a P-51 Mustang cockpit, shooting on the ground in front of a green screen and adding the environment in post. We are on an extremely low budget that would not allow for artificial lighting, so we plan to shoot outside, next to a hangar, in the shade. Hopefully the natural skylight we get on the ground will be an acceptable approximation of skylight in the air and provide adequate illumination of the screen.
The main shots I would like to get are the pilot’s face through the windshield and a pilot POV shot showing the windshield and the dash.
I may also get a low, wide shot of the pilot from within the cockpit.
I am somewhat concerned about reflections, so I plan to have a polarizer on hand to help control them, especially for the shots from outside looking in. But the front-facing panels are also angled in such a way that I think I may be able to get a natural-looking sky reflection in them. I took a quick test shot of a real Mustang to help get an idea of the direction of the reflections, but it is inside a hangar. From this angle, I am a bit concerned about the reflections on the side of the aircraft, though they will look better when the plane is outside. Any tips for dealing with these?
In our current scheme, the green screen will be about 12m away from the cockpit, and about 7m away from the outer bounds of the plane. To keep the screen at this distance and allow for ample wiggle room, I would need about an 8m tall by 15m wide green screen. I am thinking of sewing together muslin sections and hanging it somehow from the exterior of a hangar, or possibly taping strips of green paper to a hangar wall (maybe I could even use the gaff tape as tracking markers). What would be the best way to leverage the existing hangar wall to support a green screen? Would I be able to get by with a smaller screen and moving it closer to the plane? Is this even a sane approach?
For the POV shots, I may have to rotoscope out one or two of the prop blades. I don’t imagine that should be too difficult if I keep the blades from overlapping with the glass in the gunsight (if we have a gunsight).
There is a small amount of forest green metal that may possibly appear in one or two shots. I might be able to work with this with framing and/or roto, but would I be better off going with a blue screen instead to sidestep this issue?
Also, I plan on shooting with an a6300 and an external recorder which would provide an 8-bit UHD 4:2:2 image source encoded with ProRes. Do I need to rent a 10-bit camera given the transparent surfaces, or will this suffice?
Are there any other significant hurdles I am not thinking of?
I know it will be a challenge, but I really hope we'll be able to pull this off; any help would be greatly appreciated!