How To: Green Screen

One of the easiest special effect to pull off is Chroma Key, or more commonly referred to as green screen. Beginning filmmakers or your typical vlogger can use this technique relatively cheap. When filming a scene where you, as the filmmaker, would like to make the background different than what it is, have your actor stand in front of a big green or blue background. The reason why green and blue are used, is because they are farthest from the color of skin. A room wall can be painted green or blue, or you can fashion fabric or poster up that is that solid color, big enough to fill the frame.

Once you’ve established your own green screen you need to focus on your lighting. Make sure you have it evenly lit before filming.

Wavelength Media, has an easy to follow tutorial for beginners. Their best advice:

“remember the two most important considerations: 1.The colour and lighting of the green screen needs to be as even as possible. You can't have anything in the foreground (i.e. part of the the subjects) which is the same colour as the green screen.”

Sometimes the simplest of rules are broken and the Chroma Key fails to look as seamless as the filmmaker intended.

For the purposes of this blog, I am using a MacBook Pro in where iMovie is the chosen editing software. It is extremely useful for a filmmaking beginner because of the ease of use and the amount of online help you can receive for it.

Step one…film your subject in front of a green screen.

Step two…film your background, or find photographs of for your background.

Step three…import all filming into iMovie.

Step four…drag the selection of film or photographs you’d like as the background into the upper left hand side.

Step five…drag the green screen film work you’d like to use ON TOP OF the selected background in the upper left side of iMovie.

Step six…select green screen and watch it put together.

Of course you’re going to have to edit it to get the timing right, but it really is that simple. I found a great tutorial that says the same steps, but shows you how to do them:

Ken, from Maholo.com, the website that can teach you basically anything you’re interested in knowing, has a video about how to use a green screen with imovie11, which for your average mac user, is a must for movie magic. I found his video at macmoviemakers.com

Finally, I’d love to leave you with a fun video of one of my favorite bloggers, one half of the Vlogbrothers, Hank, showing us, back in 2009, his new green screen.

Thanks for reading and feel free to send me your green screen work!