Winning Online

More and more I find that as a communications firm that specializes in online strategies and execution we are challenged with dipping into every type of media you can imagine. One day you need to understand how Facebook can be utilized to push a message and the next you need to find experts on Google AdWords. Currently, we are working with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services to develop an online strategy for their youth anti-big tobacco group – REBEL (www.njrebel.com). Our goal in this project was to create “Live Guides” for the youth oriented anti-tobacco web site. It’s a great way to personalize the site and provide some interaction and activeness to the site while allowing the youth to be the ones to share their message.

As the project lead I found myself thrown into the world of green screens, alpha channels, chroma keys, Flourescent vs. Tungsten lighting systems, HD vs. SD, etc. etc. Suddenly, I was surrounded by words that I had only come across a few times.

We had to shoot the entire project in a native 16×9 high definition format –lighting had to be perfect. The green screen had to be just taut enough to let our lighting system distribute light evenly across the finely wooven muslin canvas. We had to constantly re-position the lights, tightening the fabric via the production clamps on the support system (a major headache for anyone who’s done this kind of work before). But it was surely a great experience.

The next step was to properly light the talent, or our subjects (the two high school students). I never knew that lighting was so important, but when you start to think of lighting as literally ‘painting’ your subjects, you start to get the picture. If you project the lights upward towards their face, you instantly create the ominous feeling of a horror movie; whereas, with just the slightest upward movement, you quickly turn that dark and dreary look to a natural daylight look –which is what we wanted.

We ended up using a Flourescent lighting system –which I hear is more commonly being used in the industry (a slight turn-away from the traditional Tungsten systems). The Flourescent system was a dream. It ran cool, the lights were powerful and it gave a soft (but not too soft), diffused look on our talents’ faces.

And after adding the elements of an on-hand makeup artist to our ‘perfect’ lighting, everything looked and feeled great. I can’t wait to see the finished product, but from looking at the early stages in the editing process, it looks like all of our hard work really paid off –the talents POP right off of that green screen.

We were lucky, as we were surrounded by a wonderful team. We hired Sean Apparicio (www.iloveyoumytv.com) as our director and Liz Jacobs (www.lizjacobs.com) as our hair and make-up person. The youth, Ben and Christine, were incredible as our star actors, especially considering they’ve never done something like this. You could see the improvement they made over the course of the 11 hour day. Yep, 11 hours!

Along my self-education of green screens and the process I found the following sites useful:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9811588-7.html?tag=more

http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=fxtips&rop=showcontent&id=171

http://weather.blogs.foxnews.com/tag/chroma-key/

http://www.videoguys.com/blog/?p=1028

http://videoproductiontips.com/2007/05/15/green-screen-technique-for-video-chroma-key-explained/

My respect for actors has certainly gone up although I’m not sure you’ll catch me reading up on my US weekly anytime soon.

BM