As part of a group project, we were given a chapter from Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” that we had to reimagine for greenscreen production. Our chapter is “Imperfect Hosts”, in which the protagonist Dream returns to his kingdom, finding it in pieces and seeking the advice of Hecate, the witch that is three to restore his position as ruler over the dream world.
For the performance we worked with 4 acting students to play the part of Dream and the Hecate.
To start, I sketched out a storyboard. I thought it would be great to have the witches dance around a cauldron in the middle of a stone circle. However, the greenscreen studio is so small that only a couple of steps in each direction are possible. To have the three on screen at the same time, we filmed them separately.
Another challenge was a short time window. We could only use the studio for 30 minutes once a week. So, the story board was great way to get started and stay structured, especially because the actors kept changing their approach as they went along.
In the meantime, we designed the virtual environment. After brainstorming and sketching out some ideas we agreed on a design inspired by Zdzisław Beksiński.
To model the environment in blender, I found some online resources that were helpful in creating a quick sky box and body of water. I tried my hand at clouds but am not satisfied with the result. Blender is extremely frustrating. Even following someone’s exact steps seems to frequently end in different results. In the end, I used a still image from Blender as a background in Adobe Premiere. For a tracking shot I placed the video into Blender and tried to line up the camera movement as close as possible. It was an insightful project, but I won’t be pursuing greenscreen keying further.
Comments