From Idea To Reality
It's never a dull moment when we are filming with client Jane Hay Sales and Staging and their most recent studio shoot was no exception. What started out as a simple yearly recap meeting turned into a discussion on how we could make their ideas for a Groundhog Day video come to life.
Jane Hay, Broker, and Partner at Jane Hay Sales and Staging approached us with the idea to use our new in-studio green screen set up to make a fake newscast surrounding Groundhog Day. She wanted to base her video closely on the character in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day.
Hay came with many questions, making sure we can knock this video out of the park for her and the team. We love it when clients come to us with fun, creative ideas out of the ordinary from their "typical" content.
Filming With The Green Screen
The day after the meeting, the Jane Hay Sales and Staging team arrived at the studio bright and early in the morning ready to bring this idea to life! The team wrote their own script that we went over with them before filming.
We shot the scene with George the French Bulldog to start things off as he was getting a little restless. George took on the starring role in the video as our Groundhog. The biggest struggle in filming with him was that it was hard for everyone else to keep a straight face during the shot but overall it turned out great and it only took us 2 takes to get the final shot!
From there we transitioned into the "news desk" portion of the shoot. To get the look of shooting at a news studio, we used a plain-looking table and some office chairs where we made sure to shoot from the edge of the table up so you would get the effect that they are sitting at a "real" news desk.
Recently we have been experimenting with our green screen and starting to use it more often but it hasn't been going as smooth as it could be. One of the things that we have been struggling with was getting correct, even lighting on our green screen and this was creating hot spots. Those hot spots made getting an even, clean key out of the green screen much more difficult.
Knowing those issues we had been having, we did a little bit of research and found a better way to light our green screen. After adjusting our lighting set-up and the addition of our new overhead studio lighting we were able to get the screen lit nicely without a problem.
Another thing that we had to keep in mind was keeping the subjects further away from the green screen as we had been before. Having them too close to the back wall would have created shadows, which would have been hard to key out. To help fight those shadows we decided to try backlighting our subjects a bit which really helped create separation between subject and background.
Editing Together The Finishing Touches
Thanks to proper lighting and preparation we were able to create a fun, funny take on their normal real estate videos. Taking out that green screen background allowed us to add the effect of being in a newsroom and being outside in the snow. We were able to use the resources that we have to find the backgrounds that the team requested to give them the finished product they desired.