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Clean Plates

Lesson 25 from: Guerilla Filmmaking

Ryan Connolly

Clean Plates

Lesson 25 from: Guerilla Filmmaking

Ryan Connolly

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Lesson Info

25. Clean Plates

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Writing Your Story

32:10
2

Script Breakdowns and Shooting Schedules

15:33
3

Finding Cast and Crew

21:13
4

VFX in Pre-Production

16:45
5

Filming Gear: Audio

13:32
6

Filming Gear: Camera

21:15
7

Filming Gear: Lenses

23:52

Lesson Info

Clean Plates

Going to mess around with a clean plate josh you wantto grabbed the camera and you just expect that I'm gonna call your name as soon as we get started you want to help him wrangle that let's just bring it right here can we actually bring up the lights on the other set just a touch we're gonna go right here. We're gonna go this way and uh can I get you guys all just to come stand right here so we're off camera let's get when we get you you could be our subject right here let's go ahead and kick on when we kick on this guy are we are already set up for him you know what? No actually because I think we're daylight here so can we grab this thiss guy here and let's let's bring your right here about there let's take it up a little bit let's go right about here uh you want to help out with this guy cool just level us out. All right, so uh well I'll just show you what a clean plate is but a clean plate is something that you're constantly going get most people should know what a clean plate is ...

it's kind of a simple concept but something that people don't often get and you often need if you have a lock down shot it's great just to grab it later if there's any kind of removal needed so what do we got we set up here you're ready to take that on let's go all for let's truck that in on him a bit more let me see what we got actually you know what that looks fine let me get you to turn a little bit let's pull focus on him yeah I will and another great good idea when you're pulling focus if you're locked down it's just punching do your digital zoom you have the digital zoom on that sign but in punching you could do the digital zoom to see exactly what your focus is doing I don't think we're not getting on camera but you could see how that's bouncing around in that little square they're on here on the lcd it's snapping in quite a bit so you can pull that critical focus and make sure you're entirely sharpe that'll do right there that looks solid okay we'll shut off the back tv so that's not interfering with our clean plate situation where's that power but all right uh let me get you to turn your body just a little bit this way so row tape for you would be counterclockwise all right and go ahead and look right there all right just roll on it okay so say this is a shot something's going down we're done with the shot let's get hands off camera and go ahead and just move out just go that way all frame we're making sure we don't have any shadows that we didn't have before. Everything's exactly what like it was, except our subject is no longer in camera, so we're just purely getting our background on ly for us to mess with later. Let's, go ahead and cut camera you're also making sure that your hands off camera at that point, you nudge it at all. You could fix that stuff, but again, we're setting ourselves up for the easiest time imposed as possible. So let's, go ahead and switch that out. Give that to stark it's good. Uh, move that move that back over there, stage it right next to the mall waken go ahead and fly this out as well one shot, so it'll be a laugh by the radio. So he's capturing that you can use this effect for so many things were just going to show you one little bit. But this is how we will remove things from our scene if we have, you know, a wire in the screen that wasn't there before. If we have a boom that wasn't in there before, you could take it out is easily, easily is that lots of the effects shots we use clean plates for it's, a really simple way to get around, you know, cem? Annoying masking or if you're not king you could do it this way so we don't have a green screen you can often do it this way it's a little more time consuming but a good way to do a lot of the effects we'll go with that so let's switch over to stark's computer which we'll show you it's just a super quick very very simple example first thing I do is duplicated side of the top layer then we're just going to drag our layer over or he's not just there and then trained this guy back on we're gonna cut off his head, see how much he moves first wrong just start over there like I said, it's a super simple effect you never have issue with it. Um, just a heads up but, uh if you are going to do something like this I mean, not the floating head I mean, this works dio but it's good to keep the context of his life head or whatever it is now you can see I did it a very sharp, like an ad and you're feathering but like a good practice if you're gonna do that, teo see how it's super sharp decide feathering just even a little bit so that way at least blends but like if you were going to just try to cut off his head or something, like kind of mask it in context. I mean, this is gonna look kind of funny. It's like that sure actually works really well for something like this, too, because we got a really nice edge there. So if we want to do something like it's head explodes or something, that would be really easy to cut this out and do that effect. We've done this so many times on film riot where we'll just man, I have searched the worst things we made something called tms, the harmony so which sounds terrible, but we like google just gory images that we could then. And I saw things that I wish I never saw on. Then you just take those images and pop them in and that's like the meat of the neck, which sounds disgusting. A few blood assets. And then you have, like, a comical head explosion type deal with the sleepy hollow. When I was working on that, the rodeo guys, exactly what they're doing. Tv? Yeah. The tv shows that they had the guy he had a green screen thing on, but they it's not there's, nothing behind it. So this is pretty much what happened, in fact, me and my lighter friend we're like let's do some rnd on it so he got it because he used to be like I'm not paying her guy roto artist he did it and I just had this system were just split out flood they're like no we can use that but it was exist exact thing it's just and that's where I said if you're going to do it to do it in context like around his neck so that way even so it looks real because you're not gonna go in here and be like show you it's gonna pull it's simple on it's gonna be like totally cut off his head looks really it just looks like the tv is his head it's tv head this is amazing such power it's as easy as that but you could see as much as you think of a clean plate is a very simple thing there's so many things that you could do with it and like he said this is what they do even at the higher ads like chopping people's heads off this is exactly what they did clean plate and just pop that thing on adding some additional assets after the fact and there you go so cool let's move on next we're going to do tracking switch back to my laptop we're flipping back and forth like crazy so let's bring this guy to right here let's also get the shoulder pad for it yes I would actually uh, let's bring this kino right here. Let's get the other one right there. We're gonna start first with some stuff on the green screen. Hey, you know where uh, you could just hold that there? Well, we don't need to throw that on you just yet. Cool. We're going to roll, so we need that card. Let's. Flip back over. Oh, I thought you were handing me something. You go and let's go into slot again. So we're going to set up sort of the same green screen setup we had before for the most part. And we could keep the house lights on for this that's. Fine. You get back it off a little bit. A little bit more to the side. We're doing the first one right now. You got that framed up, right? It's, the moving in. Ok, uh, can you stand right there just for sex so we could see what the solution is looking like? We're daylight, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, this will totally work. Alright, let's, put those on let's. Start with two that'll work. Let's, pull out. We gotta show this one. I got those curly little giggles happening again. All right, let's, go ahead and, uh, you got the piece uh, you fly us out of here all right to say the shot is this we're going handheld on green screen or maybe just a white wall something where there's not a lot of context behind him it's just some kind of flat subject in this case we are going to do green screen but we're going handheld because that's what the shot is we're gonna track in on him so let's start there and then just go ahead and roll it and then we're just gonna walk in on him goto about a name seo good reset can you wrangle thankyou so now stark you want to talk about what we're doing now so we're basically doing a over simplified version of for tracking but a lot of times I've had this for people are like a green screen my thing and I'm trying to camera track and there's nothing there so you need something even if it's just one thing to get contacts so like I said tracking it like sharp edges so we're just gonna repeat the shot to the side on uh let's move that a bit this way ok and frame up roll it's going tracking on let's do one more for focus and frame up roll track in let's do one more let's go half speed yeah turn up so I get a lot of noise what's that uh for the noisy one yeah, we can do that well yeah we'll do that next wanna go without that? All right let's go half speed on that truck and roll ready tracking one more you want me to try to pull the focus for you it's kind of hard to see right all right all right and roll check in cool cut that'll work alright next okay so on this one can you raise your hand up yeah so just go ahead and do this a few ties why we're tracking towards you all right be shake and let's roll all right let's start with not doing it I'll cue tio tio to do it I will kill you to do it ready and let's start tracking and go and start waving good all right, now you want to dio some noise all right? So basically what we're doing is we're just shooting a bunch of versions to tracks and we can show you guys where the issues are s o the first one we did was no contacts in the scene that we added context now we're gonna add a lot of noise to the scene so start can show you guys what exactly that's going to do so you want to do this same sort of environment or do you want to switch it up toe like a real world environment behind us for this no just stick here yeah for now. Okay, so let's kill these lights uh the key knows how is your shoulder you get and I'm gonna crank up the I s so pretty pretty freaking high we're gonna drop this down quite a bit you want to just go really exaggerated just blasted and the c one hundred does extremely well as you can see so you you got to go up there yeah uh so focus shouldn't be an issue this time since we're on you know I have sixteen all right so let's go ahead and roll I see the same thing you just stay in there don't obstructed take a slight step this way let's frame the kino out a bit ah little more headroom let's tilt up a little bit and track in cool cut good all right, what are we gonna get next form what do you want to do real world on this one now st stick with this yeah okay this this is also for this one we're going to mess around with some motion blur since that's obviously another big issue if you want to talk about that a little bit while we set up yes, because we're tracking it I mean, sometimes it could the tracker could pull through the motion blur what ends up happening is if it's such a low shutter that it's smearing it if there's not it's not gonna have any if it goes from a sharp to a blur like a super blurry thing to a sharp it's going to keep losing the trap so he's going to step back sorry about my reach on a punch in train them up way good with how blurry the track is tracking markers okay so just give me some bourne identity sort of movements roll right god you could stay here just kind of just moving around keep them my mount marker and frame we just sort of whip around a bit good let's do one more to calm it down just a touch but we're just doing a little a little maybe little jerks I'll actually do it for you just keep your friend role cut all right and what do you want to do next the camera tracker camera solving camera solving all right so you want to explain that we'll set up so when you're there's two different types of tracking basically there's object tracking which this's essentially being object truckers were trying to track the and then there's a camera solve where if you're trying to put something into the scene more like actually into the scene you want to have a glass or you want to solve for the camera so what it's basically trying to do is with the point track you're trying to figure out where the object is and with the camera solve you're trying to figure out where the camera is in space so we're gonna just for that right here this sort of area was if there was something right here right basically this and I'm gonna have you start here yep and we're gonna need to pull let's pull out quite a bit it's going to do that and you're gonna just walking around sort of ah ark huh yeah and you don't worry about being super steady all right let's go ahead and roll keep that frame but give us another all right let's go one more time let's slow it down let's do like uh you know a third of the speed of their actually don't worry about that I don't think we need to hear and action in a lot of shadows and let's bring it back all right you just wrangle from right here so we could try to minimize shot was cut let's do one more roll action good cut that solid josh what else we got can we fly that in please walter can you hand this to start for me? We talked about it yesterday I don't know if we talked about it today just for anybody who wasn't watching yesterday uh got it whenever you're handing gear back and forth like me and josh just did he has the camera he's handing it off to me he's not going to get hands off of it till I say got it once I say got it he knows I got my hands on it and we could move in sometimes you're passing back and forth you're moving really fast you think he has it he thinks you have it and then things get broken, I have seen it happened, I haven't done it thankfully, have I? I probably have I haven't scored good for me, you know? Basically, we're going to do the same thing that we did with the green screen. We shot a few examples and starts going to take a little bit to go through those examples and show how they work again, even if you don't do the effects is really important for you to know how this works. Tracking is something that's used constantly if you just want to add the flashlights like we were talking about before, if you want to remove anything, even if you're doing, you know, some color grading it's the same basic ideas if you're creating power windows and tracking the face toe, brighten that up, bring some more saturation out of that. So tracking is a really, really big part filmmaking and being that your grill, a filmmaker, it's something that you really need to keep in mind and understand we have some questions we could hit. I wanted to ask as faras guerilla filmmaking. I just want to know why. Why is green screen important to guerrilla filmmaking? How you incorporate that I mean it's? So grill filmmaking, I think people get wrapped up in this whole, uh, that's a c one hundred. I don't have money for that that's an alexa. I don't have money for that. You guys have all this gear. You have all this people, we're really you should be thinking in terms of everything hollywood does is something that you could do it a different scale, it's all the same thing all the way down the board. So whatever they're doing to make avengers, you really using the same sort of techniques just on a really, really, really condensed level. So it's all the same idea that all these films that are doing all these green screen environments and they're super insane and they got like, a hundred foot, you know, cycle all happening, we don't have that we have much smaller stuff, but it's the exact same principle whether you're doing an online thing like we do with film riot with virtual backgrounds on explosion, that you're obviously not going to put an actor in front of with guerrilla filmmaking because we don't have the permits to do whatever it is, even some of the effects. I don't think we're going to be showing them today actually but a lot of the effects that we do on film right if you're just having one actor do some kind of maybe teleport or something like that it's a lot easier to have them go out of frame and you can mess with all that if you have just them on a green screen you can create him out of them as stark showed you and manipulate the background and your subject independently of each other and the others are you set yeah kind of doing that weird that we could take like a couple more questions if you have more you guys have any go ahead so obviously a good example of this is from the two towers lower the rings when they had all those shots with andy circus and they had to take him out they didn't have a lot of clean plates for that so how do you do something like that painting yeah that's what that's where you have people like like did you guys see the first captain america okay remember skinny steve that wasn't fake they went in there and did that all by hand with his body like they didn't so there's a lot of it's cleanup that's paint so it's kind of even if you saw the last uh planet of the apes they just go in there and then they have to match it so it's a it's a lot of creating the clean plate for that section it doesn't exist so you're actually painting that to match all the surrounding areas to create that section of the clean plate that or is ist or they just cut him out and then just make their own environment I've also done a lot where I actually did it with the peace that you're going to see on dh after right after this segment where there's an actor moving around and I forgot to get the clean plate but I have it clean over here and I have a clean over here and I have a clean over here different moments throughout so I'm taking that and plugging them altogether masking and feathering and moving it around as need me to get rid of shadows to create my clean plate from you know one that didn't exist it's kind of the same ideas the painting in a way but much more simplistic that I can actually pull off do you have any we could take one or two okay let's do another one this question came in after a long day of shooting everyone is tired hungry or a little bothered how as a director do you control the environment are we talking about the end of day or we got some time left you think well they said at the after a long day of shooting so I'm just wondering yes I manage people yes, so at the end of the day you're done shooting of course everybody's going to be exhausted and want to go home but that's what? We were talking about it the other day that's when you know if if you're starting to sense that the morale is really low you gotta shoot tomorrow, you know you do a little get together, give a little speech of some kind to rally the troops together, get them excited again of what's next to come talk about tomorrow talk about how great everybody's doing that's another thing that people don't do their not complimenting their people as they go great job, you know way to be johnny on the spot and doing it loud for everybody else hears it so they feel good and they want to keep working as hard as they can for you when you're just captain my vision, doing your thing and not paying attention to your crew that's when you start getting people a little unhappy and not wanting to do it anymore, they feel unappreciated. They don't feel excited, but when you're doing stuff like that, calling them out in front of everyone for doing that good job and not berating them when they do something stupid, since we all do something stupid, you know you're going to get people lot more on your side and you know, doing anything for you

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

1080p Screen Insert
2.40 Aspect Wide Screen Template
Rule of Thirds
Storyboard Template
Storyboard Template
Class Footage - 1
Class Footage - 2
Class Footage - 3
Class Keynotes
Stark Assets
Guerilla Filmmaking Outline
Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Samuel Befekadu
 

I bet this class will be awesome. the course is given by Ryan Connolly!! I have been watching this guy for more that 5 years. I just wasn't serous about film making then. but now since i love film making why not try to be one of them by learning form the best in the field like Rayn. he has been inspiration for a lot of film maker from his YouTube channel Film Riot. his way of teaching so funny and entertaining . I bought this course to learn Ryan Connolly's killer skill. Thanks creative live and Ryan Connolly!

Will Green
 

Great class! It starts at a very simplistic level and covers the full spectrum of filmmaking. I would not necessarily buy this course for advanced film students, however it is an amazing review for beginner students to intermediate students. I would love to see a BTS of a short film from start to finish. I've seen all of Ryan's BTS shorts and I would greatly enjoy a much more intricate play by play of the short. THAT"S SOMETHING I WOULD PAY A LOT TO SEE. An 18 hour compilation of prepro - post of a short would be awesome.

Jonathan Beresford
 

Love Ryan and everyone at Film Riot. Excellent course of the excellent quality I've come to expect from them. I just wIsh he'd act more. So funny.

Student Work

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