Prehistoric Megastorms - Big Pictures Helps Shoot New Series for
The History Channel |
 Imagine a hurricane four times taller than Mount Everest, with winds as fast as a 747. Or a super tidal wave the height of a ten-story building moving at 450 miles per hour across our oceans. Or a storm that makes the Atlantic hotter than a hot tub.
These are a few of the amazing phenomena that will be explored in Prehistoric Megastorms - a new six-hour HD series that brings viewers inside the ancient storms that helped reshape our planet.
Big Pictures crews found themselves in some pretty interesting situations working with producers from Lightworks-KPI shooting parts of this fascinating new program.
We spent some time inside the National Ice Core Lab, where scientists store, curate, and study samples from the polar regions of the world. They work in temperatures ranging from 15F to 30F below zero. Yes, that's a cold place to shoot!
We interviewed scientists at the National Center for Atmostpheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, exploring global climate change, mass extinctions, and storms from prehistoric times.
And we hung out with dinosaurs after hours at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science - shooting them with an HD camera mounted on an Intel-A-Jib. Contrary to the movie Night at the Museum, they did not come alive. Although we did our best to make them look that way!
Prehistoric Megastorms premieres this April. We'll keep you posted on dates and times.
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Great Chroma Key Lighting
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Most of us understand the basics of shooting a chroma key scene: set up a green or blue screen behind the subject, light it brightly and evenly, move the subject far enough in front of the screen so that the subject's lighting won't throw shadows on the background, light the subject, and away you go. Oh yeah, and make sure the subject isn't wearing the color of the background!
But there's something else that we should all be paying attention to that is often ignored - or simply not known. What will the scene that you are keying the subject into look like, and how can you light the subject to best match the lighting of that scene?
For example, if you know you want your subject to appear at a beach during sunset, light your subject as if he or she is standing on a beach during sunset! Simply bringing in a warm backlight from the direction of the sun setting helps sell the scene.
If it's a bright, high-contrasty scene behind the subject, make your keylight a little harder, and minimize the fill. Pay attention to the shadows of the background, and try to match...
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