SFX CONVENTIONS Green screen examples + layering

Not performing IN a bar but ON the bar top!

Here's a simple example of the power of the green screen - one from 30 years ago, long before you could achieve instant green screen keying on a Mac as you can now (there's a term for that, a very important one, linked to digitisation: CONVERGENCE).

Once you have green screen footage - especially if it incorporates full body movement (as opposed to the maximum MLS dictated by using a single sheet unless you're very careful) - you have incredible creative freedom over how you use it.

LAYERING - which isn't always through green screened footage - is one of the fundamentals of music video, a very common device but not one seen much in TV drama for example.

I'd welcome your suggestions (as blog comments) on useful examples to add to this post from your own knowledge/research.





Here's a simple example from a Thai dance-pop artist.
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VFX Shins layering that'll stick(er) in the mind

LAMAR + NIK is a joint name you may have seen from your research into video examples, and nofilmschool here compare them to Michel Gondry, high praise indeed.

The specific stop-motion technique they use here isn't necessarily what you might take away as an inspiration - look at the seemingly mundane mise-en-scene they add these stickers (you should be thinking greenscreen to achieve a comparable effect) to: stacks of coins, 'checkers' chips, cheese slices, all quirky and interesting when shot in tight close-ups.

No need for a narrative in a video as entertaining and visually busy as this, though the likes of Sledgehammer manage to incorporate this.

http://nofilmschool.com/2017/08/the-shins-stop-motion-music-video

DIEGETIC FX Smoke without fire

My enforced broadbandless blogging continues from Pepper's Cafe - 10 days of Wi-Fi only is 240 hours too much... - pertinent as it makes me think of spray...

I can't recommend the NoFilmSchool site enough. The site's name denotes its mission to equip anyone who uses it with the insights needed to produce effective cinematography. My mobile's browser has 15 tabs from this site I want to work through in more detail!

This latest post (I got it through its FB page, a typically slickly run operation) highlights an affordable smoke ... can!

As it happens I was discussing smoke effects with a student today, a topic that came up a year ago in some other country...

The spark on both occasions was The Pixies' Bagboy, an absolutely exquisite use of colour, including coloured smoke.

Of course before shooting with smoke you need to comprehensively consider health and safety (asthma could be an issue for one) and whether this will lead to any staining or odour - and how easy or not it will be to clear!!!

If I remember right this is the 40th anniversary (within a few days) of the fire at a Frank Zappa gig that inspired Smoke on the Water. Could this be the year you incorporate a smoke effect in your video?

Read the article below carefully - this is a complex area. The visual pay-off could be considerable though

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http://nofilmschool.com/2015/12/fog-machine-aerosol-spray-can

Daft Punk - TechnoLogic vid

ACT: DAFT PUNK
TRACK: TECHNOLOGIC
ALBUM: HUMAN AFTER ALL
YEAR: 2005
GENRE: HOUSE/DANCE-POP
AUDIENCE: 18-24+ (by now 15-34)
DIRECTOR: DAFT PUNK (3rd self-directed vid)



By 2005 Daft Punk were a major act, with massive worldwide singles and albums behind them and the backing of one of the world's biggest record labels, EMI (through their subsidiary label Virgin), to boot. This shows in the video: it may lack shot variety in large part, but the budget is there for all to see with the central robot figure an impressive hybrid of the Terminator and Chucky from the Child's Play franchise. The distinct horror overtones are something we might more easily associate with industrial music, which tends to display a strand of technophobia, and also points to a band willing to sacrifice daytime screenings to target their core, club-going 18-24/18-34 audience. It would be hard to see this getting airtime pre-watershed.

The layers of intertextuality don't stop with what appear to be straightforward horror/sci-fi film signifiers though: the track gained wide exposure through being sampled in a Busta Rhymes track (with Missy Elliott on vocals); the track was used for both an iPod ad and a Motorola phone ad, featured in top-rated teen drama The OC (which has a wide global following), in 2009 was featured in two separate car ads. As the track's Wiki further reports:

It is a playable track on the iOS games Tap Tap Revenge and Tap Tap Dance, and was sampled for the video game DJ Hero. In an episode of the TV show America's Best Dance Crew, crew Kaba Modern performed to a master mix of this song on February 7, 2008. "Technologic" was also featured in the game Dance Central 2.

What we also see is another Daft Punk trait: anonymising the duo in the act. The doll itself could act as a stand-in for the animations they did in the past, but we also get two futuristic guitar-playing characters, dressed like security men or police with their full-face dark helmets. Their movement is notably minimal and stiff.

Another really key feature is the link up between the vid and the stage set: the mysterious, enigmatic pyramids formed a centrepiece of the tour that was already ongoing when this video was released. As we've seen, since 2005 the change in the music business from a product-sales industry to a live performance + merchandise + archive (long tail) sales industry has been pronounced, and this was an early indicator of a band that saw that change coming - as an act advertising iPods, a key driver of that drive, should!

The length of takes is quite remarkable, and perhaps an attempt to stand out from the crowd: its certainly counter-intuitive to have such a slow-paced video. Arguably the sheer splendour of their mise-en-scene, together with the impressive SFX, is doing the hard work for them, but it still seems odd and a little unsatisfying. Its not the only time we've seen this: the iconic Da Funk video featured many such long takes too.

Layering in Vids: DMode egs

See also: http://musividz.blogspot.com/2012/02/digipakmag-ad-layering-is-key.html

I've mentioned this quite a few times - and would welcome any egs you come across yourselves as a comment to this post (including URL of any posts on this). I'll mainly ref DMode vids which you can watch from the DVD - there's also a DVD of Corbijn's vids for U2 for you to borrow.

Anton Corbijn is a notable example of a director who makes extensive use of the creative possibilities of the use of multi-layering, as the pics below from various DMode vids [see Wiki] show. However, he often diegetically projects on location rather than edits in afterwards.

A good example of

USING STILLS TO RESCUE FOOTAGE

I'll embed a classic 80s (1985) video by A-Ha below (Take On Me) which might help illustrate this point...

If you find yourself with footage thats shaky or simply lack sufficient footage to work with, you could get extra usage out of the same material by applying strong FX, or generating stills - and maybe working with these in Photoshop, as with the Warhol effect.

Watch the vid below, and see if this generates any fresh ideas...

DIGIPAK/MAG AD: layering is key

A point I keep making: key to picking up the marks is shwing image editing/ICT skills, and the key means of doing this is through careful, creative layering, where you crop one layer to add to part of another and reduce its opacity.

Here's an example George was looking at from Mumford and Sons...

Its actually a little bit ... rubbish! But it illustrates what I'm referring to: you can multiple layers in use, and the opacity of one of these (which has been carefully cropped to remove the people from the original background) reduced to around 30-40% using Photoshop.

The overall concept (a rustic, old-fashioned photo album) works for a folk band, its just that the framming within the 4 photos of the added layers is very basic and wholly lacking in creativity.

What you should be thinking of (not the only way to approach it, but a useful way to start generating ideas) is a single main image you can add layers within; band faces on top of objects within the main image (or even manipulate a pic of a mantlepiece or shelving unit to insert framed photos; a notice board to add ... notices! (could work well for some digipak text), even a rack of LPs... there are infinite possibilities, but central is the multilayering.

Don'y forget, you could create a starker, plainer text as well - you may well prefer the look of this; just make sure you include a version which showcases your image editing/use of ICT.

Using TV set for live footage: Iron Maiden vid

Another vid picked out by Rob, Iron Maiden's Can I Play With Madness. A few brief comments, perhaps the key being the use of a TV set to bring in live footage rather than simple crosscutting:
I think the key to grasping this vid is the use of teens. Maiden were a mature band with a decade of growing success behind them, but needed to ensure they appealed to teens to continue selling.

Notable too that the teens are both M+F.

From an international perspective, we get a trad cliche of England: rural, castles...

But this was also a band at the peak of their commercial success: the SFX denote a high-budget vid - taking in elements of sci-fi, fantasy, horror (traditionally male genres, matching with the music genre)
The TVs to provide live footage is a nice touch; a postmodern element (Guns n Roses would use this approach in Welcome to the Jungle and other vids too).
[Iron Maiden - Can I Play With Madness]