/u/ProperSwordfish

| comments | posts
9
Not a Green Screen believer
posted ago by ProperSwordfish ago by ProperSwordfish
56 comments
56 comments share save hide report block

I don't believe this is a green screen for multiple reasons, and I have experience filming on green screens and compositing green screens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffU54oIP9o

  1. The camera is panning and zooming. Panning is difficult but not overly difficult to match assets, zooming on the other hand is especially difficult, even more when there's barrel distortion going on which is what's happening here when zooming far out, I don't see any distortion variables between the subject (Biden) and the rest of the scene. Plus he's walking quite a distance for a green screen stage to be THAT big.

  2. The lighting. The lighting here is extremely diffused with no hard shadows and light coming from the right direction. This is EXTREMELY hard to match soft light like this on a green screen stage with point lights or diffusion.

  1. Look at the 10 second mark, the dark grey microphone windscreen (aka dead cat) can be seen BETWEEN Biden's waist (background) and his hand (foreground). Biden is just really close to the reporters creating object overlaps we are not used to.

  1. Quick green screen jobs often lead to edge distortions; discolorations, strange transparencies, color noise. GOOD green screen composites take TIME.

  2. too many recorded camera angles show the same thing. In order to pull that off you would need to record Biden (doing the exact same thing) on a green screen for EACH individual camera in that press pool to account for the camera angles.

You don't just put a green screen behind someone and magically he can be anywhere you want doing whatever you want him to do. It's like the laundry joke, "I just leave my dirty laundry on the floor and it magically gets washed and put away, AMAZING!", there's a LOT of time and work that needs to go into this to make it look this good.

If I was going to do a green screen composite and had the opportunity to script this scene, the lighting and the camera movements would have been completely different.

Biden is just really close to the reporters and creating object overlaps that we haven't seen before. I mean he is really old and senile, he needs to get in your face to hear what you are saying.