Should I shoot a whole movie green screen?

The escape doesn't actually take much. Maybe 4 minutes. I will imply most of the outside once they leave the station. The cops listen in on the radios, to hear the progress of the escape. I don't need to show the cells. Just thought it would be handy to lock the cops inside. There is one office building I probably could use for free or very cheap, but it has cubicles but you never see precincts with cubicles.
 
I think I've seen a precinct with cubicles before, but even if I haven't, I think you can get the point across with cubicles.

And four minutes, to me, is a lot. Especially considering I'm working on a film right now that tops out at five minutes. How long is this film?
 
Well this is a feature length script I am writing, to do in the future, after I've had some more experience at least, so it's 4 minutes about I am guessing but haven't written this part yet till I figure out the best way.
 
Oh.

I say don't worry about it right now. You'll do other projects in between and forget or, who knows, you might rewrite the script and take it a completely different way.

Good luck on that!
 
This guy did.
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Well this is a feature length script I am writing, to do in the future, after I've had some more experience at least, so it's 4 minutes about I am guessing but haven't written this part yet till I figure out the best way.

Feauture lenght?... but aren't you finishing a short ? Isn't it better to make one thing at a time?... you seem so unsure of everything. Better get some experience first!
 
Sure, I am just wondering what to do for a future project. Doesn't have to be a feature, just any future project. Okay if green screen is a no no, there is also one other big issue. Weather. In my short the weather changes during shoots, and it is noticeable going from sunny to cloudy, take to take. I now have to find an After Effects expert to fix that for me, which I'm guessing is quite a bit of post work. If I can't green screen weather during production, how do you guys deal with it?

It's almost impossible to find a day where the sun will shine all the way through, or it will be cloudy all the way through, as there is constant switches, and the actors and locations, cannot keep coming back forever.
 
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That a downfall of shooting on no money.

Personally, this is how I deal with changing weather:

1. Writing a script with minimal outside shots
2 IF I need an exterior scene, I think when I ll be shooting. Since I live in Seattle - I know that we have a dry month from June to September, but the rest 8 are rainy, do I write that in (Dark, gloomy, wet day)
3.We just hope that during the prodction day the weather is cooperating with us.


Plannin planning planning.

I always have a plan B, an exterior matched with an interior scene (had to fall back on the plan B during Quickie in the Kitchen).
 
Sure, but it would be nice go outside once in a while or at least shoot in front of a window. What if the weather is not cooperating, do you just resort to After Effects? Planning doesn't help cause the weather forecasting is only accurate about 1-2 days in advance and you need to give everyone more notice. Plus even if it is sunny all day, it looks different throughout the day. One thing I noticed through a scene that is only 3-4 minutes of my short, is that the sun looks different at 11 am, then it does at 3 pm, so you hardly have any time to get a scene does before the look changes.
 
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It's almost impossible to find a day where the sun will shine all the way through, or it will be cloudy all the way through, as there is constant switches, and the actors and locations, cannot keep coming back forever.

This is all pre-production stuff... contingency planning and contracts. Make sure up front that you have signed docs that state you can have access to your nouns through given production dates... then in production, you damn well hit those dates and deadlines for shooting... go go go on set so you can hit the timelines you need to.
 
But that's just it. You have no idea if the weather will match the next date of shooting. Scheduling means absolutely nothing, if the weather will not match. What good is hitting the dates, if it's raining that day, when you continuing a scene that was sunny before?
 
But that's just it. You have no idea if the weather will match the next date of shooting. Scheduling means absolutely nothing, if the weather will not match. What good is hitting the dates, if it's raining that day, when you continuing a scene that was sunny before?

Sorry to say but thats just how it is on any production. Weather is out of your control and you'll just have to make the best of it. If its raining, shoot other scenes that are indoors. If it was cloudy one day and sunny the next, either shoot anyways or pay close attention to the weather.
 
Damn man, this is just filmmaking. Stop digging into it like its a f**king brain surgery.
Does it rain outside? No. Grab a camera , white balance it, throw a diffuser above the actor and shoot the scene. Bam. Done. Go next down the list.

Does it rain? Damn that sucks. Let's shoot the interior scene then.


That's it to it.

There is a s**t ton of elements that are out of your control and you learn how to deal with them out on the field/set/editing room, not on indietalk.com
 
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Have a cover set in case of rain... that way you can be doing something if the weather turns against you during a shoot. It's all planning. Know it's going to work against you, and plan for that when making your schedule.

Scenes 12 and 17 use the same actors, one is interior, the other exterior... try to shoot the EXT first, if the weather isn't going to cooperate, then move to the INT set and shoot that... have multiple days scheduled for those scenes. Adapt. Move forward, Ever Forward.
 
I'd like to point out that the reason call sheets are sent out the night before is for this exact reason. Things are constantly changing right up until the day of, so you need to know if it's forecast to be okay until midday and then pour with rain, you're going to have to move insidee at or before midday. You find scenes you can do inside for that day and you shoot them. If it's going to rain all day, you do an INT day. If it's sunny all day, you do an EXT day. If it's overcast one day and sunny the next, diff the sun or stick an HMI into the overcast day. This is what happens on every film project from your friends with a handycam to Peter Jackson on The Hobbit - in fact, one of the BTS docos from LOTR has a shot of them in the falling snow, and the discussion that Jackson has with his 1st AD about whether to call it a day or not.

Film making isn't that much of an exact science, and it doesn't rely that much on post - how do you think they did it before After Effects..? You can make a film without a big budget and even without AFX. Go do it, rather than procrastinating finding every single little issue that could go wrong.
 
Okay I will. I just don't want to have to rely so much on AE the next time, and want to make sure I do what I can right the next time. One thing I learned for next time is to get a different kind of coverage. Even though I shot parts of a scene from different angles, I need to shoot the WHOLE scene from different angles. That way if a shot is compromised (out of focus incontinous), I will then have that shot from a different angle. But it does seem difficult to shoot a whole scene from that all the angles in the storyboards and get it all done in one day, but I will plan more accordingly.
 
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Coverage is a different issue, and it's about having done the rehearsals with actors so they do the scene the same way each time, and also having people who know what they're doing operating and pulling focus. You don't need to get the entirety of the scene from 15 different angles, for example. You might get the whole/most of it from 2-4 as your safety angles and then the other ones don't necessarily have to be the entire scene from top to bottom.
Coverage is a completely different discussion, you can cover a scene in two shots and you can cover the same scene in 15 shots. Neither is inherently bad, but I prefer to work with 'coverage' that tells the story the best, rather than simply having all scenes from all angles.
 
That's true. Well I want to cover it from two angles only in certain shots. Shots where I want two actors on screen, and want to show all the movements from both their point of views. I got plenty of coverage of actors who are in shots, all on their own, but not enough over the shoulder coverage, or coverage of more than one actor in the shot.
 
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