No Budget Films
Filmmaking Techniques
The Green Screen
One of the most crucial tools for a filmmaker is the green screen. What is a green screen, you may ask? Most video editing software comes with green screen technology, also known as chroma key. What this allows you to do is to select a color (typically green) and completely remove it from the shot, making those portions of the video transparent. Filmmakers will put up some sort of sheet or backdrop that is of one consistent color (again, typically green). Then they'll film their subject in front of this green background, and later in the editing process, will get rid of that background altogether, to be replaced by something else. This is an extremely useful tool for putting your actors into exotic locations, scaling objects up or down, adding things into a shot that weren't originally there, etc. But be careful! If the subject you're filming has any speck of the screen's color on them, then those areas will end up transparent as well! When picking the color of your screen, contrast is recommended. One interesting green screen method we've found here at No Budget Films is to use the sky itself as a green screen. On a bright, cloudless day, the blue sky is a dramatic contrast to the rest of the landscape, perfect for chroma key. We can then remove the sky from the shot and replace it with some sort of giant monster or something or other... the possibilities are endless.
Stop Motion Animation
This is a style of animation that is done with real life objects. Any object can be used, but something small and poseable is most recommended. For most of my stop motion projects, I've used Lego. So how does stop motion work exactly? I like to think of it as a glorified slide show. Stop motion is made up of many, many pictures that play in quick succession. To animate your object, it must simply be moved a very tiny amount for each picture. And when all the pictures are played together quickly, it will convey an illusion of motion. This technique is less seen in today's films than it once was, but it's still around in films like Coraline (2009) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). Notable examples in the 20th century include Ray Harryhausen's work, the original King Kong (1933), and The Lost World (1925).
Puppets
Puppetry is a highly favored technique used by No Budget Films. Puppets are relatively cheap, and easy to obtain, so they fit the bill perfectly for our movies. There are several different types of puppets- Hand puppets, string puppets, rod puppets, among others. The type we use is of the hand puppet variety, as these types of puppets are perfectly suited to the big-mouthed, chomping dinosaurs that our movies feature so often. A puppet creature can be inserted into a shot using a green screen, or simply filmed right on set. Watch out for your arm, though- Nothing ruins a shot like a glimpse of the puppeteer controlling it. I guess the question remains: How do I make my dinosaur puppets look so big? Occasionally I use the green screen technique to insert the puppet into a shot (sometimes hiding my arm using a green screen suit), but much more frequently I use a more primitive method- Forced perspective. By holding the puppet close to the camera, it can be made to appear much larger than the people and objects in the background. I came up with this method myself some time around 2009 or so, although other filmmakers have also come up with this same technique.