Yes, I know that St. Patrick's day is mostly gone. Indeed, it may have already passed by the time you read this article. Or even by the time I get around to writing it!
Despite all of this, and given the green nature of the holiday, I thought it only appropriate to unveil something interesting we've been working on: We now have a fully functional (albiet small) Green Screen Studio built into one of the basement rooms at the Markley Ranch. Don't believe me? Check out the pictures!
Yes, it took us a few weeks to build, but I was able to successfully re-use many of the parts from the ill-fated EMIT::Patrol project from 2005, which helped keep the cost of building this studio down to a manageable amount.
So, as you can see from the pictures, we have a bolt of chroma-key green cloth running about ten feet along one wall, taking a corner, and running another three and a half feet along that wall. It's not really huge, but with some imagination and creativity, we've been able to accomplish some pretty spectacular effects anyway.
On the ceiling, we have seven light fixtures which together throw out 32,550 lumens of light. (We have more if we need it, too...) The lights are organized into three banks. One for front-lighting our subjects, one for back-lighting them, and one for lighting the green screen. The back-lights are magenta (known to lighting pros as "minus green") to help separate the screen from the subjects.
Another neat feature you'll notice when looking at the screen are the hundreds of little green thumbtacks pushed into the screen. They were a pain in the neck to install, I'll tell you what... For one thing, no store in the world sells matte green thumbtacks. Go ahead and check. For another thing, when we decided to buy white tacks and paint them green, I had no idea I would end up having to scrape all the paint off (including all the original white) in order to get a solid green coat.
So, I'm sure you're all wondering what in the world we're using the green tacks for. At least, I hope you are, because if you're not I'll be wasting quite a few keystrokes on the explanation.
The green tacks are there for match-moving. The green screen is plenty big enough for us to pan around on it, which is great... Until you realize that there's no way in hades for us to match up any sort of background to a panning shot. Trying to line something like that up by hand would be horrible to behold! (Think 70's Doctor Who only worse.)
But nowadays, these fancy computers they've got can do just 'bout anything! All I need is a reasonably dense, even distribution of points on the screen, so when the camera pans the match-mover can track the motion of the points. I then have a whole army of computer programs (written by me, of course) which take that data and feed it into our 3D program.
And voila! Instant magic!
Anyway, the green screen is up, it looks great, and I've been using it to put together lots of short little demo reels in my "spare" time. Nothing really useful yet (mostly just 4-5 second clips here and there) but I'm hoping to have something more cohesive and interesting to show off in the next couple of weeks.
Stay tuned!
ttyl
--Alex Markley
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As a matter of fact, 
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Submitted by Vox on Tue, 2008/03/18 - 12:06am.
*applause*
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A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.