This month our video series "Upload" received funding for it's second episode, so we're happy to show you "Upload Part Two - birthday"

Lacking the kind of specialist studio or lighting rig needed to do chroma key filming, we resorted to a cheap imitation: The Microsoft Kinect camera.

This web-cam has a laser range-finder built in, meaning that for every pixel on the screen it knows not only the colour, but also the depth of the surface in the image. Obviously it's then fairly easy to write the software to just turn every pixel beyond a certain depth green, and use that to chroma key in Cinelerra.

Trouble is, the camera lens and the range-finding lens are not one and the same, one being a good few centimetres to the left of the other. This means that thanks to parallax effects, each has a slightly different vi
ew.

Adam built some custom software to scale and shift the views in order to get then roughly aligned, but this is never going to be a perfect job. Luckily, the entire point of the green-screen scenes is to project the image as being computer generated, so a bit of blockiness is fine, and when we add Cinelerra's hologram effect and a bit of other video trickery the final result does indeed look pretty computer generated.

The backing music this episode is a Creative Commons track from Portuguese artists "Zen Baboon", which seemd to suit the moodiness and darkness of Sam and Eve's little argument.

Part three of "Upload" will be produced if 20 people donate another pound, or one person donates 20, or indeed any combination of donations that bring our tip-jar up to a total of 30 for the serial. Check out the fund raising page at http://upload.commonshostage.com/