Re: Advice on painting a set?



Thank you, very helpful advice. I intend to show at least 50% of the
room. Because the short is situated entirely inside the room, I want to
use different angles to avoid appearing too static, so greenscreening
isn't really an option. I will need to cover a bay window, however, and I
was thinking about using heavy kraft paper to create a wall in its place.

jaybee- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


Well, the neat thing about greenscreen is that it doesn't care. Go
ahead and shoot "plate" shots of each side of the room, of all the
angles you want to use. You can then create matching setups all on the
same green stage, which doesn't have to be any bigger than the people
and the furniture they sit on. To change angles, turn the couch
around to the new facing direction, call another take, and don't even
touch the tripod. Bang, you now have the second angle. (well, to be
fair, you may have to tweak lighting each time you do that to insue
continuity, but this masy or may not be sgnificant based on how things
are lit) If you need to move the camera around, you can do it, but
motion tracking the footage adds time and work. I would suggest this
method in situations where the actual room cannot be touched or
changed, or if you only have it for an hour but need it for days.

If you can put a real wall up over a bay window, it sounds like you
really have the run of the room however, so you probably don't "need"
to greenscreen, you can just paint. But you want to do it on the
cheap, I guess.

For that new wall you can build traditional flats. An option that is
rigid and more or less self-standing, but not heavy, is to use 1-inch
or thicker insulation foam board. Very easy to cut and shape with a
sharp knife and sandpaper or a hot wire cutter tool from the craft
shop (or make your own, it's just nichrome wire from radio shack or
the hobby shop in a nonconductive holder, and a variac, car battery
with or without the charger, or a model train transformer), and
lightweight and cheap.

Prime that foam with a bucket of Kilz brand latex-based (not oil
based) primer, then you can use anything on top of that without
chemically melting the foam. I would go with wallpaper on the foam at
that point for the final finish, but house paint will also work. If
you are clever about staggering the seams, you can leave the foam
panels single for easy transport and setup, and just gaffer tape them
together across their backs, then use double-stick tape to lock down
the wallpaper seams. A 2x4 wooden stringer, just a wee bit longer than
the floor to ceiling distance, with some padding on the ends, can be
jam-fit with a mallet to stand as a temporary vertical brace to back
up the foam wall. Some c-clamps and you're done. Or if you have Bogen
auto-poles or something like that, use those of course.

As to aging the room, I found that the local home center has a great
selection of paints and glazes for doing faux finishes, and such
glazes over the room's existing paint will let you age, stain, and
yellow the walls subtly, with a bit of control. Glazes, while more
expensive than regular quick-dry paint, are deliberately slow-drying
to give you time to work with them or undo them if it goes wrong. They
have free brochures at the store to show you how to use them too.

And don't forget you can do marvelous grading changes in post these
days even on home desktops to cool or warm the color temp and subtly
alter the feeling of the space that way. Some combination of these
tricks of glazes, on-set lighting gels, and color tweaks in post can
achieve a really good look.
.

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