Bluescreen or ChromaKey is a way of compositing or superimposing two seperately shot foreground and background images togeather. A cheap way to do Bluescreen is to go to Walmart and get yourself a large electric blue cloth. You can place your subject or subjects in front of that cloth, light them and film them. Then take your video or film and digitize it. You can use computer software like Adobe After effects or Premiere to remove that shade of blue you have in the background. You can then replace the background with anything, depending on what you want. This is an expensive effect and you must have a way to composite your images togeather. The only way we can save you money is to advise you to buy your bluescreen at Walmart instead of going to costly film lighting stores. Also, test the effect on video before you shoot on film. That way you will be sure your lighting is correct and that you're not wasting expensive film. The problem with blue screen is that you must light the scene PERFECTLY. You have to make sure your blue or green background is not made of a shiney material. The entire backdrop must be lit with flood lights to ensure equal exposure to the entire background. You can light your subject the way you normally do, but remember to put an amber or yellow piece of gel onto the backlight. This will ensure that your subject is completely separated from the background.

If you've ever wondered how you can use blacklight to reaveal writting on a wall, then we have the information you need. A good way to have writting appear is to use a yellow highlighter or laundry detergent. The laundry detergent is great because is leaves no trace elements before you expose it to the backlight.

Tools you will need to work with clay. A plastic or formica type table is probably the best work surface as they will not move while in use. If you do need a movable work station than a large plastic board works well. It is advisable that you don't use wood or painted surfaces because the clay will probably stick. A toothpick comes in handy when making small dents or holes. You could also get needle tools for making holes of different sizes, handles on larger pokers can be used to make large round dents for eye sockets. You need at least a sharp long knife for cutting up the clay and a dull knife for making knotches without cutting the clay. You will also need a roller or something to flatten out clay sheets. Cooking tools such as pasta machines and pasta makers can be used to make the clay flat or into different strings. Those fake cooking sets used with children's clay sets can also be used. Finally you will need armatures to shape your clay around. The armature acts as a skeleton that holds your clay together and it allows you to move the body parts around. Premade armatures can be found at arts and crafts stores or online. Armatures can also be made at home using wires from hangers, we buy more flexible wiring at a hardware store. With the wiring you can make any skeleton you want. Lighting, one of the most important things when doing claymation. The lighting can sometimes make or break your scene. Good lighting makes editing and chroma keying much easier. The basic goal of lighting is to get rid of those unwanted shadows and to get your background screen clear of darkness. Lighting also adds to the mood of the scene and directs shadows to the wanted position. We recommend using at least 4 lamps to keep your chroma colored background free of shadows. Then extra lighting to add shadows or brighten certain parts of a scene. If you have lighting all around the scene remember to add a backlight too. Without the backlight, objects in the scene get a ghostly type glow to them making it seem unnatural. For example 3 lights(above, left, and right) light the background, 1 light acts as a sun, and 1 backlight. Personally we like to use desk lamps with bendy poles because we don't work with very large characters or scenes. Also desk lamps can accept different wattage lights so that you can't get the disired amount of lumens out of a lamp at a certain position. Finally, remember not to get the lights too close to your figures too, they produce heat and clay doesn't like heat. One way is to use miniature sets with the puppets(actors) and then shooting the live footage in the background with a projector. Using this method you could get moving "real" people in the background and clay characters in the foreground. With the cost and effort of building a miniature set most people don't use this method. The most widely used form is called split-screen rear projection. Using the projector scenes would be shot on a plate with a glass sheet placed in front. Then the puppets movements and positions would be calculated. Black paint would be used to block of the areas on the glass that the puppet would cover. The actor would be placed between the glass and the plate and animated. Once all the animations were captured on film would be reexposed to the areas that were masked off before. This created the illusion that the puppets were interacting with a real action world.

Time-lapse is when you shoot a motion picture at a film speed lower then 24 frames per second. This type of special effect is known to be very novel and most film-makers don't take it too seriously. But time-lapse is very good for shooting clouds, plants and people on busy intersections. The advantage of shooting time lapse is that it takes very little film to do it with. But, you must have patience and a good tripod to do it with. " If you shoot timelapse on video you will have the greatest advantage. You can plug your video camera into your computer's caputure card and then use software such as Adobe Premiere to capture your images. The great thing about using a computer is that you can set the resolution and frame rate. Because you go directly to digital from your video camera there is no degredation from video tape copies. " The disadvantage of using this video model is that you must have the specific hardware and software to do it with. You have to get software such as Adobe Premiere to edit the images on as well as a video capture card to allow your image to go into your computer. And finally you will need the video camera itself, to shoot your timelapse onto.