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'Green Screen' is a special effects technique which allows you to hide parts of an image. Anything green in the shot can be made invisible, allowing you to replace backrounds or other elements in a shot. The colour green is used because it is nothing like the colour of skin, allowing you to cut it out of shots easily. But it doesn't have to be green. And you don't need to spend lots of money on expensive equipment. Some coloured cardboard or even a painted wall can work really well. Check out the videos below for inspiration...
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Giving their advice on everything from breaking into the industry to the writing process, Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), and Dee Rees (Mudbound) all share insight on what they’ve learned as filmmakers.
Here are six of their best tips:
“I think the only advice I’ve ever been able to really offer people starting out is to sort of stick to your guns. You know, there’ll be something, there is something distinctive that you want to get across. Generally, that’s the thing that is most challenged by the people you’re trying to convince to let you do it, and I think the only thing to do is really stick to your guns and try and achieve something different, something unique, personal to your voice. If you let people, you know, smooth off the rough edges too much there won’t be anything that you’re bringing to the table and that’s what’s important with your first work in particular.”
“To me, it’s a strange profession we chose as directors because it’s a combination of being tough as nails and being as permeable and fragile as you can. And you need to sort of separate the two. You cannot be completely fragile because then you won’t make movies. You should become a poet or a painter, you know. A filmmaker is never going to die and they’re going to find a drawer full of movies that he never did. And ‘oh my God’ it’s going to be on DVD and Blu-ray. It won’t be. You have to be a tough motherfucker to get into the business side and fight and tell the bastards, ‘No, no. I’ll do it my way.’ A lot of fights. You have to be tough in that and you have to fight and be able to defend what the movie needs to be. Defend it, and then at the same time you need to be incredibly, incredibly permeable and fragile. For example, you can be screaming at your producer one moment about the crane not being ready, and then you have to be completely open with your actor and watch the actor perform. So it’s very very strange.”
“It’s the biggest advice I ever give young filmmakers. Pick the right projects and take it seriously because you don’t want to end up in a bad marriage. You don’t want to be like idealistic and say ‘maybe I can change their minds,’ maybe you can’t. You know, and if you can then you’re on that ride. So, it was a wonderful experience. I don’t think it’s always that way, but because of the fact that there was such clarity about what we were doing going in, and then you know, I just did it.”
“I had internalized this idea and said, ‘Look, I can’t worry about this movie getting made, I have to write my favorite movie that doesn’t exist.’ And so that put me on this path of working on this. And it wasn’t like every night, for five years. It was — I allowed it to be my hobby. I allowed it to be the project that I would go to instead of watching TV. That would be the most fun thing I could do with my time. And the whole purpose of it was to help me get better as a writer. I know that from ‘Key and Peele,’ when you’re having fun writing, that’s where you get the east/west bowl shit. It just works. Fun works. That’s kind of my advice to anybody, any writer or artist dealing with writer’s block, which we all deal with. Follow the fun. If you’re not having fun writing, you’re doing it wrong. Shift up your tactic.”
“For any filmmaker I would say you just have to write your way into the picture. Or if writing is not your thing, if you’re a shooter, shoot your way into the picture. You have to have some craft that gets you into the game as a young filmmaker. No one is going to come looking for you. No one is like ‘you know what we need? An NYU graduate.’ You know, so you have to create the thing that people want to make, and just that’s your way in. So I would say if he’s a writer, keep writing, if he’s a shooter, keep shooting. You have to just bring your own ball and start your own game.”
Part of making a film seem authentic means observing things in real time and emulating that. In an interview for Moviemaker Magazine, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri writer-director Martin McDonagh says:
“If there’s anything that can teach you to write dialogue, it’s listening to people. That’s one of the most important things. In some ways, you’ve either got dialogue or you haven’t. I don’t know if there’s any way to test it, really. As long as you’re honest with yourself and keep writing and being honest as to whether it’s good or bad, there’s no secret. Listen to people, observe people, as opposed to going to the movies and listening to characters. You can sit in a diner or on a bus, or walk down the street and listen, properly, and if possible write down exactly—to a word—how people speak, that can help. I learn by traveling to small-town America and speaking to people. I like to take trains a lot and now and then a bus or two, and I like to go into local restaurants and listen to people. In my daily life, I hardly ever swear, though my characters do quite a lot. But I don’t judge them. A lot of my characters are working class people, and that’s the language that these particular types of working people choose to use. It’s never to deliberately shock; in fact I hardly even notice that there are so many swear words in there until people point them out to me. While traveling, I keep my eyes open for an interesting town or landscape. That’s what happened with ‘In Bruges.’ I like a town to be a character and a backdrop to a story.”