I first got involved in video through designing artwork for DVD menus and encoding footage for use online, but found the progression onto filming and editing a fairly natural one. I have had a lot of experience of dealing with the types of problems that show up in a video environment and am used to dealing with things like PAL and NTSC conversions, footage shot at different aspect ratios, codec problems and mixing SD and HD footage.

I have quite a lot of experience of working with green screen video. We had a small green screen setup at the company I used to work for, which we would film footage in front of. The small size of the setup and the uneven green background meant that we did not get the easiest of footage to work with, but I became quite good at getting professional looking results by processing it in After Effects.

You can see an example of my green screen work on the Pal Systems website.

In the summer of 2010, my then colleague Nuj Farrow asked me to make a video for his heavy metal band, Sickfixation’s song Refresh Resurrection. I had only worked with talking head green screen video for business DVDs and websites, and was keen to try out something new, even if it wasn’t my favourite genre of music!

We bought a relatively cheap green screen and light set, but it still produced much better footage than I was used to working with! We borrowed our companies Sony HDV camera and hired a room in Wokingham’s No Machine Studios, which was only just big enough to fit everything in.

We couldn’t fit more than one person with their instruments on the green screen at a time, so I had to film them each individually and composite them together in post-production. After filming, I discovered just how long processing HD footage takes! My poor old computer spent over 100 hours rendering the final sequences, and a lot more time testing things out before that.

This is the result:

I also put together some of the outtakes, and some footage shot on my digital camera to produce a “making of” video that seems to be de rigueur on YouTube these days!