Holy Bluescreens Batman

The polytechnics in Singapore had their Open House(s?) recently, and my poly is no exception. I had the privileged of being tasked to setup the booth to attract people to sign up for our new Digital VFX diploma.

My original idea was to setup a real-time chromakey display with a bluescreen and live video feed mixed with CG digital backdrops using some real-time software compositor. Imagine my dismay when I found that this not easy to setup, surprising given the maturity of bluescreen technology.

Lots of practical problems abound: the hassle of lighting the bluescreen sufficiently brightly and evenly, blue spill from lack of shooting space, the difficulty of extracting clean mattes from our cheap DV cameras, difficulty in matching pre-rendered CG to non-fixed camera angles.

I was almost ready to give up the idea of doing it in real-time and go for post-production, thereby losing the impact of a "live show". At the eleventh hour, a colleague forwarded me an industry contact which saved the day. My thanks go to the generosity of Shah from AV8 Media, whose sponsorship helped make the show possible.

The solution: Reflecmedia. Below are some photos from our setup. The rubber glove Godzilla puppet, keyed in real-time over a CG ocean backdrop, was a hit with the crowd, as was the Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility trick.