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• Up Against the Blue Screen in Guizhou

  2009-01-30 7:49PM / 標準BLOG / 會員可以看
  3個評論
  I've recently returned from the city of Guiyang in Guizhou province where I was acting in a Chinese New Year "TV special" comedy series. The show is called 《开行邦》 or presumably "The Happy Gang". It is being broadcast on Guizhou TV over the Chinese New Year holidays. The production was a whirlwind shoot, filming 5 episodes over just 3 days. To make my head spin even more, I found out I was going to be in the show only the night before!
  
  
  
  
  It was cold and dark when I arrived in Guiyang airport. Little did I know I would be shooting almost as soon as I'd put my bags down! We shot at the Guizhou TV studio, below:
  
  
  The entire show is shot against a blue screen that covers three walls and the floor. As the show is set in both historical and modern times, we could shoot different episodes back-to-back without changing locations or sets. One of the most difficult parts of acting against a blue screen is that you get no sense of locale or mis en scene. So for me, it's easy to feel wooden and rather ridiculous. Also sometimes you have to watch where you walk as there are pieces of furniture on the set that you can't actually see (but the audience will see on their TV's).
  
  

  
  

  This is what you see when you are "on stage" in front of the blue screen. There is an A, B, and C camera to shoot different angles simultaneously.
  
  
  In one episode my character gets bound and beaten by three warrior women, in the old kungfu movie tradition. This was one of the more fun scenes and I think ended up looking pretty good.
  
  
  To one side of the set is a closed studio with TV monitors showing live footage from each of the three cameras. The director selects which angles to record and cut to from this room, rather like a studio for live television.
  
  
  In a room down the corridor, the scenes are then instantly imported onto computers, where the process of matting the background begins, below:
  
  
  What made this show even more difficult was the fact that many of the characters would deliver their lines in the Guiyang dialect. So while my lines would be in Mandarin, I often wouldn't understand the response, making my following line even harder to deliver!
  
  
  Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, folks are busy on the sound edit for episodes shot earlier in the day. By the time we have finished shooting two episodes, the first episode is already mostly cut and heavily in the sound mix. A very efficient system indeed!