Twin Screen Project- The human body and the digital World... Final Piece Attempt 1

I began by filming at my house with my actress against a plain wall. I lit the wall as best as I could with the small amount of lighting I had at my house such as desk lamps. I would have hired out proper film lighting like a set of red heads but with only public transport to get home I found it would be too much equipment to carry so I decided to make do with my lamps at home. However after finding out how hard it was to light with small lamps I realize red heads would have been much easier so in the future I will plan to use them and find a lift to help me get them home. Here is my basic lighting set up with my actress in it:

As you can see the lighting set up wasn't that good but I did the best I could with what was available to me and I already tried to make my actress as much as a silhouette as possible so that I could just enhance this in post through the keying out process. I experimented with her doing everyday activities like having a conversation and being on the phone but these weren't identifiable as a silhouette really so I then tried the contemporary dancing and this worked a lot better and made a much more visually pleasing silhouette so I decided it was one of the dance pieces I would edit.

I imported my favourite video from this shoot into After Effects and tried the keying out process however it didn't really work because I didn't have an identifiable enough background for the tool to pick up. I did my best with the key-light tool though and I even played about with the setting for 'Screen Matte'for a while trying my best to make it a full black silohette but I could not quite get it there. Here is a screen shot of what it looked like:

The poor lighting set up I had has defiantly effected my ability to be able to key it out properly in After Effects. I played with the settings a lot to see if there was any way I could do it but I was unable to achieve a better result that what you see above. This wasn't going to work with my final idea because all the detail you cans still see in the background and on her will distract away from the images I wanted to layer over the top.

I had a think about another way I could go about manipulating this footage to end up with silhouette and I remembered our workshop/lesson on Rota-Scoping and how we used this to cut images out of a background. I decided to give this process a go and see if it would give me a better result. I found it very hard at first to cut her out with the rota-scoping tool because of the tiny details like her hair etc. I spent a long day trying to do it and it was so complicated I only got 35 seconds of the video rota-scoped out. I thought I would put it in to a twin screen composition after this because I wanted to see how it looked so far and I wanted to mirror it against itself to see how it looked. Here is a screen shot of what it looked like:

Because I found rota-scoping was a much more difficult and time consuming process I haven't achieved something that I am happy with so far. I have managed to make a silohette twin screen piece without any images layered over it yet but it isn't working like I want it to. It is too messy and I feel like if I had a green screen I could have keyed it out and had something far more professional looking. Also I regret the very close up framing I chose for this shoot.

I have decided after all this experimentation that I am going to re-shoot this in a more professional way. I will hire out the green screen studio space on a day which my model/actress can make and we will re-shoot but this time with much better results hopefully.