One Person Camera Crew - The idea

The goal of this project is to reduce the number of people on the film crew to one person. I’ll take each job and explain how it could be automated or combined with other jobs

Lighting

A lot of lighting work can actually be done in post-production. With modern software like Lightroom and Photoshop, photographers can reduce or increase the effects of shadows. It wouldn’t be very hard to mark different areas in the scene or parts of an actor’s face as being the same color and locally adjusting the lighting to remove all shadows. If the camera is paired with a distance measuring sensor, like a Microsoft Kinect, then it should be possible to add additional light sources in post-production. We’ve learned a lot about subsurface scattering and can do a much better job of modeling the effect of light on skin.

Makeup

Like lighting, makeup could also be done in post-production. If the parts of an actor’s face were painted with makeup in a handful of keyframes, the software could track the person’s features from keyframe to keyframe and put the makeup on each in frame in between.

Audio

Cameras are getting smaller and lighter, that frees up weight for other things to carry. It’s possible to make a small backpack that does that work of a boom operator including making sure that the mic is always out of frame (if it’s controlled by software looking at the live camera footage). In addition to removing the need for a boom operator, it’s possible to do a little more with audio. If the cameraman is also armed (or decorated) with a set of microphones, then it’s possible to do better audio processing in post. With several microphones, one can determine difference sources of noise and select which one(s) we want to hear, or the mix of different sources.