Social Matchbox’s “Summer Social” was held on August 20, 2009, at the E Street Cinema in Washington, DC. It was a huge event with 10 organizers, one of which was me. I was organizing the multimedia (aka: who is doing what in regards to video and photography). I did the videography myself. The other two photographers, Marc Benton and Nikolas Coukouma, were tromping around during the event and taking pictures.

Marc was assigned the big scary task of shooting all the presenters, hosts, and organizers, and Nikolas was given my favorite job, which is “shoot the audience!” I, personally, was in the lobby interviewing presenters in front of a big green screen. The two photos of me in this post were both taken by Marc Benton.

On-location green screening is always a tremendous challenge. The biggest reason it’s difficult is THE LIGHTING- shadows are murder on a green screen! Because I keep my own costs low (in order to pass the “low-cost” part on to everyone else) I operate with a minimum of equipment. My camera, a Sony PDX-10, is broadcast capable and can handle two XLR microphone plugins (most small cameras can’t). But I don’t own big huge studio lights because they are extremely expensive, and therefore I rent them instead. The lights I was using for this event were what I was calling “big honking lights!!” and they lit up the lobby like the sun had been invited.

When you invite the sun, you invite problems.

I was using a continuous three light set up, with one light positioned BEHIND the screen (to light it up and dispel shadows) and the other two criss-crossed in front of the person being interviewed. It was extremely bright (yay!) but the person being interviewed was hot (boo!). Unfortunately, 500w lightbulbs (3200K) are hot.... Nothing I can do about that :( Also unfortunately... They draw a lot of power.... And sometimes it blows the  powerstrip!

I was in the middle of interview number three when POOF all the lights went out, the camera went off, and the interviewee looked nervously around like he’d done something wrong. “No problem,” I said, and proceeded crawling around behind the screen, repositioning plugs and wiggling the lamp around. Voila! Lights back on, camera reset, interview concluded. With the magic of editing, you’ll never be able to tell which interview got stopped in the middle!

With the magic of editing, you’ll also never be able to tell which one of the ten turned the mic off in the middle of his interview.

I have been known to use a lavaliere mic (lapel mic) in my sit down interviews before, but I discovered something: nervous people twiddle their hands around. My solution, therefore, is to give them a microphone to hold instead. Mostly, people hold on to it for dear life and occasionally wave their free hand around, but every once in a while you’ll get a twiddler and the twiddler will twiddle the microphone switch to “off.” When this happened (only once, thankfully) I proceeded to crank my secondary mic up (the shotgun boom attached to the camera itself) and fixed the sound later. When you get someone that nervous, you don’t tell them they’ve done something like that or they’re likely to crawl under the chair and not come out.

A live event always has hazards. In this case, I had to move my station around three times because (1) the angle of the lights was all wrong, and (2) I needed another plug and (3) the green screen decided to droop and I had to poke it till it wasn’t wrinkly. But here’s the biggest hazard: SOUND.

At a live event like this, you want background noise. A nice hum of people in the area, chatting and talking- that’s great. What’s NOT great is someone yelling into their cellphone (that actually didn’t happen this time) or someone making a lot of noise in general. This time, one of the theater employees had his walkie-talkie up to “SCREAM LEVEL” and he was standing nearby, completely oblivious to the noise he was carrying around. At one point I turned around and asked him to turn it down (he did). On a normal day, that noise is just fine. When you’re interviewing someone live on camera, sound like that is terrible.

When I started work on the footage, I was very glad for the excessive lighting. Bad lighting, as I mentioned, can cause nightmares. “Green screening” is not really what it is at all- it’s actually called chroma keying. Essentially, within Final Cut, I apply five different filters  (color smoothing filter, chroma keyer filter, matte choker filter, spill suppressor filter, and the garbage matte filter) and adjust it until the green background completely disappears and the person is floating on nothing. The description of how to use the controls takes up eighteen pages in the manual, and then there are cross references to other parts of the manual as well!

In a fun world, this is where you make superhero movies and have fights with Godzilla.

In a professional world, you make these types of serious videos instead :)

The videos created for Social Matchbox begins with their logo on a purple background, which I eyedropped to a backlayer matte from the original logo to place behind everyone. The logo then shrinks and snips itself in half down in the lower left or right. (I did this by keyframing within the motion parameters of the logo layer). Then, the person (who is now floating on nothing!) appears and talks. During that time, I inserted another layer which pops up their name and title (a plain looking text), and they all disappear one by one (fade out of each layer) and the Social Matchbox logo then moves over to be in the middle again. A nifty flip, and then there is MY logo, just in case you didn’t know I made it.

Whew! Finally! Here is the final product:

Here are all the links to the rest of the interviews:

Adam Boalt of Boalt Interactive

Sohit Kerol of Diditz

Ben Bixby of Earth Aid

Mike Mayernick of Giv.to

Andrew Wright of Grasshopr

Ted Williams of GrouperEye

Christopher Brown of TapMetrics

Eli Holder of Unblab (embedded above)

Rory Kelly of Wegora

Chris Cairns of Win The Trophy