explorations in green

this whole semester has been comprised of monsters. pedophiles, man-bats, and invisible lunatics. the latter has been occupying my time for the past month or so. what started out as a bit of a whim with a technique experiment turning into a crash course in new technology. i had been toying with the idea of doing an invisible man piece for a little while now. doing it effectively however, was a little bit daunting. i had a notion of attack, but wasn't quite sure. using green screens for replacing backgrounds is one thing- using it to remove heads and hands and moving body parts that continue to interact with objects is another. i had a few notions of how to go about it, and decided to really attack it with a test shoot.

the original assignment was called 'the forced marriage'. all it entailed was being paired with an acting major from the senior class, who we would then have to work with. i was assigned an actor named James Ortiz. James and I got along right away, and i have nothing but great things to say about him, and our experience on the invisible man together. upon doing a test shoot, i was inspired to go about things even more off the handle than originally planned. instead of just using green screen for invisible man techniques, why not green everything, so i have as much flexibility as i could want? digitally create locations, lighting, the works. all of this is totally new territory for me, but i decided to go for it.

learning the technology was a lot of fun, and very easy to do. it did not take very much time before i had down the basic do's and don'ts and could instead just focus on technique and performance. aside from james, i came across an actor named michael strelow, who plays the invisible man's counterpart, kemp. working with two new people in a completely new environment was great, though it caused me to change some things stylistically for myself. i am very used to picking up a camera, shooting hand held, and when something catches my eye, i hone in on it. here i could not just shoot from the hip in the same way. here there was a new level of planning that i needed to conform to. if there was a certain shot i wanted, there were ususally three or four shots needed in order to compile it into one at the end.

overall, having a now near-finished product, i'm pretty pleased with my decisions to go all green, and to tackle the subject matter the way that i did. i kind of took green screen and used it as a blunt instrument, and hit everything i could with it. now that i have a large understanding of how it works, i can use it more surgically and hopefully more effectively at that. on to the next monster...