PTK - Studio shoot - Gripping and Green screen

In this workshop we put up a rough idea how our sets were going to look using the wooden flats that are in g12.  We were lucky enough to find a flat that had a whole cut out of it in the position we needed for our actor to punch through  meaning we wouldn't have to sit and saw a hole out of the flat.  This was helpful as it aloud us to get the dimensions of the hole so we could start planning and organising materials to use in this scene.  We planned out room to be 3flats deep and 4 flats wide which makes it a bit bigger than a prison cell would be but gives us some wiggle room for camera and lighting to be put in with out being in the way. To suport the structure we need a flat on each corner to stop it falling down as well as a wooden been in the middle of the wall. 

After that Chris (the technician in g12 ) went through and showed us how to use the elemack and the flat bed dolly correctly. This was very use full to our shoot as i had planned a few shots that involved camera movement, which we could do hand held but would not look as clean as if we used the dollies. Both of these dollies come with a seat so it allows the camera man to be next to the camera at all time and are on wheels so they are easy to move around. To attach the camera to the dollies we need a romford head + medium sized tripod plate. The elemack uses air pressure to move the camera up and down which if pumped to hard can cause an build up in presure making it harder to bring it back down. The flat bed dolly uses hydraulics to move the seat up and down which you also have to be carful with not to over power it.

here is some more information on ellemak and flat bed dollies
http://visualproducts.com/storeProductDetail03.asp?productID=475&Cat=56&Cat2=57&Cat3=80
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/filmglossary/web/terms/dolly_dolly_shot.html

 Anne then went through how to set up a green screen correctly, the main parts of this are making sure there are no creases and it is lit well so its an even colour. It is best if there is going to be some movement or panning to add tracking point so when in editing the thing you are adding on to the green screen moves in time with the camera. When it comes to useing green screen in our shoot it will be mainly on the tvs to get the reflection and glow from the tvs rather than using a curtain or green paper it will be best to play a green video into them to get the correct effect we need. 

We then decided to make the most of the time we had left to do some test shots and play around with lighting, the look we are going for is very grungy and dull in the prison room. Mainly low key but with a reflector to soften the face a tiny bit . In post production we are going to lower the saturation to about 20 % to make it less colour full.   The creative room will be very bright and colour full lighting  but very low key playing with silhouettes and shadows a lot of the time using. we will up the contract and saturation in post to emphasise these things. 

The images bellow are a few test shots we did they are not quite the effect we are going for but it showed us what we need to work out and also reminded us were going to need to coloured gells and the orange lighting is to warm for our shoot.