I think the shot came out quite well. The lighting looks very natural.
I think this means that LED screens accessible by non high budget production studios are viable as light sources for shots, reflecting the techniques used in live set productions like the Mandalorian.
Some issues are the camera shake, where it is very difficult to create a still image with such a tight dynamic shot where every small movement is emphasised.
We shot on braw to retain as much data as possible.
Using Davinci resolve I applied a LUT to bring the colour space to rec709 and ,then tweaked the colours a lot.
The lightning behind this shot worked fantastically as when the lightning flashed the stones and the ring lit up accordingly.
The problem is that out use of an LED screen has made the light too blue.
We pulled back some of the blue output
The reflections on the stones were realistic but also extremely blue due to the screen.
Rotoing out the the reflections proved useful, where the colour could be corrected to be more white.
This improved the reflections, but the sky still looked slightly artificially blue.
After sorting the colours out in Da Vinci, we bout the dpx export into Nuke
There were some reflections on the screen that needed to be roto’d out using a minus merge
We then tracked the footage.
Using the tracking data, we removed the jitter in the shot. There was a lot of jitter because the shot was so tight.
We set up the shot in the room with the TV behind the subject.
We used the lighting set up in the room to enhance it.
Arranging the jewellery and props.
Making sure exposure is correct on subject.
We shot on 35 mm for a natural look. We had quite a short depth of field to help obfuscate the screen in the background
We found that we had to play around with the refresh rate of screen and the the shutter speed to get rid of the flicker. Once we tweaked it though we were able to remove all flicker.
Once problem with the screen is it reflected a lot of light from the rest of the room, breaking the illusion. In the end we opted to just use the screen for light.
We rented out the green screen room as there was great lighting already set up .
We rented a Blackmagic Pocket 4K, a colour chart and a gold light reflector from the kit room. We also later realised we needed a Ronin to stabilize the shot as it was such a tight shot that any small movement was noticeable.
then found a random assortment of shiny jewellery to use in the shot, as well as some stones, that I cleaned up. I also found some flint.
We found some stones and flint, which were cleaned up. We then used some varnish to make the shone look wet and shiny and used some fake plant like materials.
A huge factor in getting this to work as best as possible is finding a screen with as high a pixel density as possible. This means that the screen will be showing the most sharp natural looking possible, The best I could find in the university was a large 4k screen that I wheeled with the help of the AV team into the green screen room.
The footage shown on the TV needed to be 4k as to be as high resolution, this is some stock footage we found to use,
Carlotta and I were inspired by this blog.
In this blog the team used live production techniques on a smaller scale.
As you can see, the team used live set produciton techniques. They used a large LED screen behind their jewelry with recorded scenery as thier “green screen”.
This allows for really natural lighting on the subject.
In our project we will see if we can create something similar to this cool effect.
