This is a multi-part blog series.

0. Overview – objectives, challenges, key steps.
1. Obtaining “blackness” under the player’s arms, above the legs.
2. Creating a nicely-diffused lighting of the keyboard yet permanent and compact.
3. Mounting a good quality overhead camera available when needed.

How to achieve “blackness”: black surround, black under the player’s hands and arms.

First, we tried green screen and color keying technique, and secondly a non-reflective deep black panel. Color keying hasn’t worked well and the spray-painted mat black still reflects some light. So we kept looking. and found that simple black cloth works as best solution.

Spray-painted green screen for color-keying in video editing.

Black mat sprayed “shelf” – but cloth is better.

Next video shows re-thinking the “blackness” under the player’s arms — investigating materials:

The solution turns out to be simple – black cloth bought from IKEA. Here is how we fixed it and the result.