Last month we shot over 58 pages of script for Big Brothers and Big Sisters of metro Atlanta.  As I mentioned before in this post, we were commisioned to create a series of training videos which would be both educational and informative.  The goal of the videos is to inform mentors of the curriculum that the organization wants their mentors to emphasize with their ‘littles’

The script called for a large amount of special effects work.  Much of which involved a greenscreen and a virtual set.

The two main characters are Mentors in Black, the best of the best when it comes to mentoring young people.  They have been selected by the Mentor in Black agency to monitor all Big Brothers and Big Sisters all over the country and ensure that they have the tools they need to push the curriculum of the organization.

I ended up building a virtual set for the MiB Headquarters and designing the whole thing using 3D space in After effects. This allowed me not only to place the main characters in the virtual set, but also allowed me a little bit of flexibility with my shots, in that I could actually move the camera in AE around my set and get different angles on the actors (within reason of course, we’re still talking about a 2d greenscreen matte)

I created the set quite simply to keep render time to a minimum.  The floor and back wall are nothing more than solids with the “grid” effect applied to them.  I used about 12 carefully placed spot lights to give the scene some depth.  Then I placed my actors into the scene. I created 2 angles for the scene, one of the actors from the front as seen above, then the reverse:

The feeling of the scripts is a big cartoony. So I wanted to keep things light and make sure they never looked too realistic. But I still needed to tie the video into the scene and make it look a little less obvious that it was all greenscreen work.  The trick there:  Shadows and reflections.  As you can see above, I added a reflection of the giant TV screen (With my face on it) to make the screen seem less like a floating piece of video, and more like an actual part of the scene. I did the same with with the other angle of Jason and Courtney, adding a shadow behind them to show that they wern’t just appearing in the virtual set, they were actuall having an impact on it and affecting it.