Chroma Key

Watch the video mov / wmv

Here is another short clip from last spring. I had recently bought my new camera and was trying out some green felt I thought could work as a chroma backround. I only had a very narrow slice of that felt so it had to be shot quite close to the screen. To light the background evenly three 300w worklights were spread aprox. 3 meters away and 2.5 meters high. These lights were used as my keylight. On the right side I placed a 150w worklight a little too close and on the left there was a window to give some of that backlight. It made a nice impression of a bright light source, like a window, being right behind the character.
Eventhough lighted evenly, the fact that I had to shoot at close range left some felt texture showing, leaving the key a bit too noisy. I managed to remove most of it, but there are still some points where you can see the outline wiggling.

There are three plates in this shot: the character, the street and the window, which is a black solid with the text and some noise and splatter added to it.

I wanted to have a look of a shallow depth of field with the camera focusing on the background when the character looks over his shoulder. So I created a camera, made the plates 3D layers and moved them on the z axis. I set the aperture and blur level to get the result I wanted and then animated the focus distance.