We’re currently building another film studio with a green screen at our offices in Stockholm, and I thought it might interest you to know why that is.
The easy answer is: our first green screen studio is always booked! We record our own courses in that studio, live stream training to the whole world, and sell studio time to external companies who need video produced for them, live or recorded. And it has now reached the point where we can’t even meet new customers to show them the studio, because it’s never available, even to us!
The reason, in turn, for this rise in bookings is of course the rise in demand for digital, web-based, training. Only two years ago, we usually had to sell in the idea of online training to our customers; that is more often than not just not the case anymore. Today our customers come to us with a pre-conceived training plan, including a minimum amount of training that needs to be delivered online, in a self-paced fashion.
So what are we building? Well, the first plan was to just build “another one” of the thing we already had. Which sounds like good enough if our only goal was just to be able to increase the availability of our studio services. So we calculated what that would cost. Then we started listing things we would want in the new – green screen – studio, that we don’t have today, and with that in mind we ended up with roughly double the cost of building a copy of our current setup.
Green Screen Technology
And what do you get if you pay twice as much, you ask? Good question! First of all, more green paint! Green screen technology, or “Chroma key”, is a super flexible way of filming people and things, cutting them from the background and arranging them again in layers together with other video input to produce an effective and visually pleasing end composition. Our new studio features a chroma key “Cyclorama”, also called “Infinity wall”, which means a green screen that is not just a flat wall, but covers several walls as well as the floor. The areas in the corners between walls and between the walls and the floor are all rounded so as to not create any shadows anywhere. This means we can film individuals or groups of people from several directions at the same time. Including the green floor in the shot means we can place these people in any virtual setting. Do you want to be on the beach? Or in a mountain cabin, perhaps?
Incidentally, not all chroma key is with green paint. Some is with blue! While green colour works very nicely almost all the time, it stops working the moment you absolutely need to wear a green shirt. Because that shirt will become transparent. Or maybe you want to show a device that just happens to be green? For these occasions we use a blue backdrop instead to make all customers happy!
4K Resolution Cameras and more…
By the way, filming several angles simultaneously means using more than one camera, of course. In our new studio we will have four main cameras, all in 4K resolution. One of them is in a fixed position while the other three run on rails and can be moved around.
All the light fixtures are digitally controlled and can be set to not just different intensities, but also different colour temperatures to make a wide variety of lighting schemes possible.
Apart from the visuals, we also need sound, and since the stage is bigger now, we have four parallel wireless sound systems for speakers. And as an extra bonus, a more comfortable viewing lounge for members of the visiting group who are not in front of the camera, but still want to see what’s happening.
So in short, building a new studio turned out to not just be a copy-paste situation.
If you’re in the neighbourhood, Södermalm in Stockholm, come by and visit our green cyclorama!
We also have coffee.
Want to know more about Our Studio and Astream Business?
Until next time,
The Apis IP-Solutions Team
