Man with a Movie Camera

If you know me at all, you know that one of my greatest passions in life is filmmaking. I first got into film making when I was in middle school when my friends and I would film funny skits on my best friend’s camera phone. One of those videos even included me breaking a 3 inch piece of ice with my head. Though that one particular incident isn’t the smartest in my lifetime, the joy I felt from making those short films lead to me making short films in high school and numerous sketch comedy videos in college.

Though, I have a good amount of experience with the subject, I am always finding new technology being used in film that I can barely grasp. I remember when I first found out about the technology behind green and blue screening (aka chroma keying). The technology behind it is actually simple really. Basically what happens is that the editor tells the computer to ignore all of the green in a shot. The reason the color is either green or blue is because these are the two colors that are farthest away from the human skin tone. If it were the case that you cancelled out a color that was close to the human skin tone then the subject would either disappear or look like some form of ghost. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, you can watch the weather and see the weather map on the meteorologist’s tie because he wore a green tie that day. It took me almost a year to fully understand chroma key which is a fairly basic film technology. Who knows how long it will take me to learn the next one.