Fun with green screen and Flash
Over the past couple of months, I've been working on a project called CHANCE (Connecting Humans and Nature through Conservation Experiences), which is a site that that addresses the need to train Pennsylvania 9th - 12th grade teachers in environmental science and ecology. ETS has agreed to help out on this project due to the loss of the project's Flash developer who graduated and moved on. The modules we are working on have to do with global warming, and in one of the activities the project lead, Jackie McLaughlin, wanted to have Dr. Richard Alley speak about what he does in taking ice core samples in Greenland. To make it more interesting, we thought we would put Dr. Alley on site with the help of a green screen (or a green painted wall in our case). So we had him come in with a coat and goggles with the intention of putting him on a snowmobile to take the students out to the research site in Greenland. I had Kim Winck act as my videographer and Justin Miller was also helpful with lighting and camera settings. I had Dr. Alley sitting on a chair to give his little spiel. After a quick dry run, I had to have him be somewhat less animated than he normally is, so that his hands wouldn't get cut off from the video boundaries. I also had a tripod in front of him with a black bar on it to simulate the steering handlebars of a snowmobile. He would grab them at the end of his talk and take off on the snowmobile. Here is a couple shots of the greenscreen:
I also took a couple still pix of him sitting on a box to simulate the snowmobile for his "ride" in Flash.
Dr. Alley is a great speaker and was able to nail his little speech on the first try, but we had to redo the end because he forgot to put on his hood and goggles to start his snowmobile ride. With the magic of Adobe After Effects, I was able to create an alpha channel from the green background after which I exported the movie as FLV. I then imported it into Flash as a video to the timeline where I could view it easily. I then placed a snowy image from Greenland behind him and cut out an image of a snowmobile to put in a layer in front of him. I had to cut the windshield out of the snowmobile and create a new symbol for the windshield in Flash, which I then made to look translucent and added a few highlights.
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