UCB Productions - Questions?

[toddbieber]

I work on a lot of the UCB Comedy Originals that come out of NYC. If anyone ever has questions on how we shot something or what equipment we used or why we did something a certain way -- let me know.

I'd love to see this message board become more active with questions and comments. Make it the "go to place" where we can help each other out.

[brianbarney]

Checkmates clocks in at 2 minutes and 16 seconds... looks like alot of locations and alot of setups. And it looks great! Curious how many days of pre-production go into something like that, and how many days it took to shoot.

Thanks,

bb

[toddbieber]

Honestly, it's been a while (about a year and half) since we made checkmates. So I'll do my best to remember how it went.

We had 4 locations.

Ellie's house (not really Ellie's house -- some house on the Upper West Side)
Ellie's school (the language school on the 9th floor, above the training center)
Park in LES (used as 4 different locations)
Chess Tournament - UCB Office lobby.

(plus we quickly shot Ellie walking down the street in front of UCB offices)

We spent about 3-5 hours at each location. We shot it in 1 full day and 2 half days.

Will Hines handled most of the pre-production (casting, locations, costumes). He and I and Sean Clements talked about those movie trailers (Step Up, Save the Last Dance, The Cutting Edge, etc.) and I watched them repeatedly to get the look we wanted. When editing the video, I continued to watch those videos repeatedly, which helped maintain the style.

It was a great time to make. I'm glad people like it so much.

[brianbarney]

Cool, thanks for the behind the scenes info. And thanks for jogging the memory on that one. :O)

bb

[carolynawesome]

Do you have any experience working with green screen footage? I'm interested in doing some, but I've found a lot of the videos on the web that don't do it so well.

Any tips?

[angrylou]

I have had some experience with green screen and the key is placement and lighting. You can't have your subject too close to the screen otherwise it causes green spill, which is reflected light off the screen onto your subject. This is normally seen around the edges and that is why some amateur green screen footage looks the way it does (resolution also plays a major part). 5 feet should do the trick. Properly lighting both the green screen and the subject is important if you can do it. If you can get some gels, great. Using gels helps green screen a lot from my experience. Use green gels to light the screen and maybe purple gels for hair light on the subject to increase separation between the subject and screen. If you are doing this for the first time always ALWAYS have a test shoot. Then you can mess around with the lighting and placement of the subject to see what keys well and what does not; so when it's shoot day your are firing on all cylinders. I hope this gives you some idea and has provided more answers than questions.

Lou

[VAN2JC]

I'm finding our sketches are hilarious on paper, funny to improvise, fine once cast, okay when shooting, so-so when it comes out of editing and don't meet my funny vision by the time it's on a 3 minute youtube video. Is this just part of the process of "getting to the funny" eventually through experience and tweaking? Or is something in our process failing us? I know you can't answer specific to what I'm doing wrong - but wondered if others run in to this issue and how you worked out your kinks to get the end product to meet your original vision.

[toddbieber]

I think this is totally natural. I've made a bunch of video and this still happens to me quite a bit.

I suggest having a table read of the script before you shoot. Do it in front of friends. You can see/hear where the audience is losing interest and then revise the sketch accordingly. If they don't laugh during the table read -- chances are they won't laugh during the final video either.

Once you have the video cut -- do the same thing. Show it to friends before you post it. If you need to cut your video down -- do it. A 1 minute video with three laughs lines is better than 3 minute video with three laugh lines.

Hope this helps.