Blue Screening & Compositing the Fire Jump

An explosion erupts from a trap well set and hurls three men off the edge of a bluff. "CUT!" yells the director. In a warehouse somewhere, the three men get up off the crash pad. But wait you say. Where did the fire, bluff and even the night go? Answer: nowhere. In fact they were never there. The only thing that really existed was the bluff at one location and the men jumping at another.

This technique of putting multiple images together to form a single one is called compositing, and is a lot of times aided by the use of a Chroma color screen, sometimes a blue or green screen. In reality, the concept is very simple. Your live action plate is filmed against a solid color. Then in post that color is told to be ignored. The result is your action happening against a blank hole, ready for anything to be behind it. This is exactly what we did for Operation Room Check.

     
                   
First we constructed a blue screen. In this case, the camera needed to be pulled back a bit, so the screen had to be on the larger side, resulting in a 34 ft by 12 ft screen.
Money is always a factor, and this production was no exception. Adaptation is always a good thing, and in this case, the wall itself was already there. The blue was simple butcher paper stapled to the wall.
 
 
 
Lighting is always an important factor, and maybe even more so for a blue/green screen. In this instance we used two shop lights placed on either side of where the action was going to be. Correct lighting not only makes the final composite more believable, but also easier to key out in post. We were fortunate for our area lighting, since the overhead fluorescents filled in the action quite nicely.
 
 
   
 
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