so much for blue screens

Blue screens are wonderful, combined with modern digital keying techniques they can make an editors life easy. Simply select blue on your video editing program's keyer and watch as the background disappears!

Except, if you're not careful (or don't have the logistical time or capability to be careful), blue screens don't help much at all.

Here's the story, we want a shot of Little looking out of the door into the Cosmic Void ™. Knowing we wanted this I had three plans in place:

Plan A: We hang the blue screen outside, and it simply keys out of the picture, leaving a clean and empty background for me to underlay the Cosmic Void ™ I created.

Plan B: We hang the blue screen outside, and it does NOT key out nicely (because of the lighting and distance), and I color correct the portion of the screen that Little is in (using simple tracking) to be more orange (this way her orangeness will reduce any sort of bleed or confusion when keying out the color blue which is opposite to orange on the color wheel!)

Plan C: We hang the blue screen outside, and it does NOT key out nicely (because of the lighting and distance), and I am forced to rotoscope the background out manually, cutting out the background frame by frame*.

...

Guess who's on plan C!?

But, it's actually fine... it's fine! Because, it's not actually that much to do, it took me about three hours and I've got a pretty good rough rotoscope of 1.5/4ish clips with the Cosmic Void ™ in it. I don't actually mind it too much because it's not hard, just mind-numbingly time consuming... normally I'd put on something on Netflix or YouTube while I work to make it a little more bearable. Good news is we have 11 days to edit! (I want to finish by the 31st we can potentially submit it to some film festivals!)

An example of plan A, B and C working in tandem in a later shot:

*okay... its only almost "frame by frame" because Final Cut Pro X allows me to do every other frame and it tries to fill in the blanks.

(A helpful video reference about green/blue screens that came out while I was making this post: https://youtu.be/aO3JgPUJ6iQ)