After my last post ranting about the very limited usefulness of redheads, I was asked what the alternative is for cash-strapped DPs. There are plenty of cheap fluorescent photography-studio-type lighting kits available on eBay now, but they have their own problems. So can you light without any film lights at all? Yes, you can – and here are a few examples.
If you work in video, you may be familiar with Red Giant Primatte Keyer. Red Giant’s Primatte and Digital Anarchy Primatte Chromakey both use Primatte chromakey technology, developed by Imagica Corporation in 1982. [Wikipedia] The last update for Primatte Chromakey for Photoshop was January 2012, but it does work in current versions of Photoshop.
If you’re working with still photography, it’s often necessary to cut someone out of the background to place them into a new scene or to add special effects. While there is no specific “Chroma Key Tool” that is built into Photoshop, it still has great tools for removing the background and other elements from an image, non-destructively.
Editor's Note: When Matt over at the OnBlast Blog contacted me about this infographic he created, I was pretty impressed with the work he'd put in and agreed with a lot of his picks and points. (He even had some ideas that I wasn't familiar with, despite running two magazines using wordpress as our CMS.) Since we as filmmakers want our websites to just work, knowing which plugins are a good idea to start with can be a great step forward in making a site that helps you promote your work, without getting bogged down in all the nitpickiness of WordPress! (Now, if only he'd make an infographic on the top plugins for user submitted content, we'd really be in business!) Enjoy this great infographic! (Just remember that, because it's a graphic, you can't actually copy and paste the expert hack codes into your blog, but will need to retype them. Hopefully, he'll make an easy link to download this off the graphic in the future!)-JTH
Recently I’ve been involved in pick-ups shoots for a couple of projects I lensed last year: action-comedy feature The Gong Fu Connection and fantasy series Ren. Both pick-up shoots were strange experiences, featuring some very familiar aspects of the original shoot – locations, sets, costumes – but noticeably lacking others – certain actors, crew members and so on. The Ren pick-ups in particular were like re-living principal photography in microcosm, with stressful crowd shoots followed by more relaxed, smaller scenes and finally night shots with flaming arrows again!
Lately I’ve been working on the electronic press kit for Kate Madison’s web series, Ren. An EPK is a collection of footage that a broadcaster can use to edit their own piece about your film or series.