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Date: Sat, 04/25/2009 - 12:03 by Dawn Casey
At the Social Matchbox event I reverted to my "used to do" and interviewed people. I say reverted, because I used to be a reporter- Pentagon Correspondent, actually- and sitting around talking to people is what I do best.
So at this invite-only event, there were geeks galore. I affectionately call these types of events "Nerd-Fests" and I have, actually, seen someone wearing a pocket protector :). Sometimes, they are really hard to interview- they don't say anything!! Many Geeks are very quiet, and when interviewing someone, the hardest thing to hear in response to a question is a one word answer. Fortunately, I'm married to a Geek, and I can get most of them to start chatting away and viola! Great video ensues.
There were a multitude of presenters at Social Matchbox and my goal was to interview them, ask them a few specific questions, and have them tell me about their company... all in a three minute interview that I was going to remove the background on! Robert Neelbauer, the guy in charge, took a picture of me while I was setting up Nicholas Tolson for his interview.
Greenscreening has it's own unique challenges. For one, you need good lighting. At this event, I was actually under a couple of terrible lights and in the middle of a hallway, so, I had a jolly good time later having to adjust everyone's color to be "not-yellow." Florescent lighting is terrible for giving everyone an odd hue.
I then took the video home and the process began! I had fifteen videos that I needed to put up within 48 hours, and no, you can't do a big bunch of them at a time, they've got to be done one by one. One of the videos, Keith Casey of Blue Parabola, was not a presenter at the event but was just my very patient husband who sat down and let himself be interviewed for the fun of it.
The greenscreening process involves up to seven video filters and a whole lot of tweaking. It works by removing anything green in the frame, and the reason *that* works is because green is the only hue not present in human skin. You can also do it with a blue screen although it's more difficult. So, I sat there and patiently tweaked and adjusted, shaded and smoothed, and eventually ended up with a person sitting in front of a "nothing" and therefore I could put them in front of "anything" that I wanted.
In this case, the background was simply a blank color with the person's company logo behind them. The logo pulsed once, hung out while they talked, and then fizzled away at the end right before they were done speaking. In some of the videos I made the background black, some were white, and some where a color that corresponded to the person's theme. It all depended on the logo. Embedded here is the video of Joel Selzer of Ozmosis, a nifty doctor's resource.
This one was one of my favorites, because Joel was really a dynamic speaker. A lot of times, people have trouble looking directly into the camera (a problem I solve by standing right behind it with my face right next to it) but not Joel- he looked right into the lens and said THIS IS ME. It was great!
Greenscreening is one of my very favorite things to do. It's tremendously fun because it's manipulating video and making it... well... COOL. I think these videos came out well, and they were also well received by the people that had appeared in them! The Social Matchbox crowd was happy with it too, so hey- I am thrilled.
Here are the links to all the videos made at that event:
Greg Bardwell, Innovative Query Inc.
D. Keith Casey Jr., Blue Parabola
