Directing on set is always very challenging and hectic. There are numerous people working and collaborating together at once and they need excellent communication to make sure everything runs smoothly. As you can see from set, we were able to pull off quite a bit.
We shot the live-action portion primarily on the Sony F3, recording uncompressed HD to a Black Magic Hyperdeck Shuttle. We were limited to 35mm, 50mm and 85mm prime lenses. For some shots we used a Sony EX1 because of it’s wider stock focal range, as well as Canon DSLRs. Recording uncompressed is great for green screen because compression makes pulling keys far more difficult. The downside is that uncompressed HD creates a lot of data, very quickly. We most likely generated about 4 TB of footage throughout the entire production.
We tried to simplify the lighting designs to give us the most flexibility in shooting with the green screen. By minimizing how long it would take to set up lighting for camera, we were able to acquire a greater variety of camera angles and coverage.
To keep track of our progress, we placed every storyboarded shot onto a shot sheet that had information such as angle, action, length and elements. This allowed us to keep track of what was happening in any given shot, as well as keeping track of our progress throughout the day. Every finished shot was one less sheet still on the big board.
When it came time for pixelation, we actually had clips of every shot to load into the Dragon Frame software. We could then prepare shots and block them with the actors in real time before setting up to do frame-by-frame photographs. This allowed us to make sure that any camera angle would work for the entirety of the sequence before we were to do into it to fix it.
JAHELA! 