Beagle and the Green Screen
Early morning studio call at Magick Lantern to vidi a dog for a client’s new online banner. I’m first at the studio so I get to calmly setup shop for myself and munch munchies they’ve crafted. The large rear set has half of a curved wall painted in green-screen green. Talent arrives — just the cutest beagle I’ve ever seen.
I brought my laptop equipped with CS4, quickly took a screen-capture of today’s Yahoo main page, put that on a big After Effects layout, and as the director filmed in HD Vidi, he’d pop lorez copies of those takes onto a flash drive. I keyed out the green and, voila, instant dog walking across a Yahoo page into the square banner advertising.
It was easily seen in a first test that we didn’t have enough of the dog walking across green screen. So the director got the wall painted more, and within a half hour, we were back trying again.
It was critical to have that real-time interaction between filming the scene and actually testing it right then for its worthiness.
Here’s my first test. I don’t even have the high-def footage back from the studio. This is using the lorez download from this morning. The ads aren’t real, either. And I don’t know where the burning film even applies ’cause this thing was shot all digi vidi. Huh.
