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.
...

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

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.