Digital News Production: CREATING OUR SET

Creating our green screen set was pretty simple when we thought about it, but when it came to actually putting it together, we found it difficult to find imagery and a good picture that would fit our presenter. Vic was in charge of doing the green screen and Charlie and I helped him pick the image.

We wanted a straight forward nature theme background, however as we didn't light our presenter properly (no backlight) she looked really flat on all the images which was a big disappointment. Non of the images we tried fit and they all looked strange.

I told Vic the pictures looked too flat with just a picture behind and we needed to make it look more 3 dimensional. I said we should start looking for a desk instead and put Samantha behind it. Vic then also added that we should add a TV screen behind her with our channel name on it and when Samantha says 'coming up' we show the clips on there.

I found an image of Google of a mock up of a desk, I really liked it however thought it looked too fake. However, we decided to go with it and Vic began working on it. We agreed that in the part where it says 'Daybreak' it would have our logo on it with an image of wood behind that we was going to use for the original green screen background.

Vic then got to work and used Photoshop and After Effects to cut out the desk and parts of the desk so it would become a PNG and we can use it in After Effects.

I helped Vic with how to use the tools in Photoshop to changed the desk colour and key framing in After Effects to create the animation when the footage appears in the TV screen as he wasn't too sure but I think he did really well to learn it quickly. 

Then we imported a background image Charlie took of leaves on a tree in summer (for his previous project) and it looked a lot better with the desk as it wasn't flat anymore and looked more professional instead of Samantha almost floating in the air without a desk or anything.

Here is the final image of Samantha Scott that Vic edited together.

In conclusion, I think the editing of the presenter started off really unsuccessful however we worked well together to finally get around all the problems and create a nice nature themed studio.