Digital News: Greenscreen & Live Report Workshop

Today's workshop is split into two sections: the morning will be experiencing and taking part in a live interview, and the afternoon will be learning about green screens.

Live News Report

We were split into two groups: one half of the class with the other (about groups of 9), where we were then given a choice to be:

- A director
- Camera (x2)
- Vision Mixer
- Sound (x2, also interviewer and interviewee)
- Floor Manager
- Lights (x2)
- Runner (cable bashing)

I decided to go on camera. Nonetheless, the task was pretty straight forward: we were given a sheet with questions which the interviewee asks the interviewer. However this was all we were given so we had to set everything up depending how we feel it in the studios. This includes where to put the cameras, interviewer/interviewee, lighting, etc.

How did it go?

If I remember it correctly, it took around an hour and a quarter to set everything up and rehearse it once. This shows how long it takes to set up for one simple interview - we wanted to perfect it and try not to make any mistakes.

In my opinion, I think it went quite well. For the cameras we used a dolly so we

could have a moving wide shot instead of sticking with two still shots. This shot also varied from a long to a medium shot, whilst the other camera focused just on close ups of the two people we were filming.

We worked well as a team and managed to set the lighting up near enough perfect so that the cameras didn't have high exposure and a grainy look, meaning that the visuals were of high quality. It was good experience to see what its actually like filming an interview - its not as straight forward as you think!

Green Screen

This is something which I was quite looking forward to. We were given the task to try and set up the correct lighting for the green screen, so that when the image is generated there isn't any shadows or any errors which you will be able to see when the screen is running.

At first this was rather difficult - the green screen was quite large making it hard to make the lighting on the screen balanced. For example, some parts of the screen would be lighter than others causing a glare, then others would have little shadows. Also, we learnt how that the green colour can even bounce up onto the person on the green screen. This too causes problems as it too will show up, meaning that you can't exactly have light right in front of the character on the screen.

Eventually we managed to get a decent balance of light on the green screen. We then watched examples of videos seeing to the extremes of how large they go for film sets!

 Today's Thoughts

Overall, this workshop proved to be very useful. I didn't have much experience with either of the tasks especially the green screen which I've never come across. It's also taught me a few tips and advice when using the green screen as well as other useful understandings such as how a vision mixer works.