Topic: Green Screening

Ok, I would like to attempt a green screen in a film at somepoint, but alas, I am a complete novice when it comes to setup. mini/confused I know how to use Cinegobs Keyer as I tried once before, but am unsure with the actual green screen.

What kind of material should I use? Cloth? Posterboard?

How do I light the screen evenly as to avoid distortion?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
~TB

Caveman didn't discover fire, fire discovered caveman.

Re: Green Screening

im not sure.i know there is a kit i saw it on tv a few years ago it includes a green screen.

Re: Green Screening

your best bet to get it nice would be to get some construction paper or poster board and put it a nice distance from the set and light it brightly. very light green does good.

http://i.imgur.com/kmwjd.png
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Re: Green Screening

For starters, this thread seems laden with good advice, as does this one.

My experience with greenscreening is purely with live action, so some of this might not be applicable to the much smaller scale used in brickfilming. Hopefully the experienced brickfilmers will call me out on any false information.

Green posterboard seems to be a popular choice for the background, but paper, cloth, or anything else that is a uniform color that isn't the same as anything in your scene will work. Once you've got that, make sure your subject is a good distance away from the greenscreen. If your subject is too close, there's a good chance (especially with LEGO) that light will reflect off your background and create an ugly green halo around your subject that's extremely difficult to get rid of.

You need a minimum of two light sources, preferably three or more, to green screen properly. Use two lamps, one on each side of the green screen, to light it evenly the whole way across. Make sure you prevent the light from shining back onto your foreground subject and creating shadows. If you're greenscreening the floor as well, don't have a sharp crease where the wall meets the floor, as this will create a much darker green in the corner, making it difficult to key out without the use of a heavy duty program such as After Effects. Curve the joint instead.

If ambient light isn't enough, use a third light to light your subject. Make sure you diffuse this light if necessary to prevent it from creating a shadow on your background. In case you haven't noticed by now, shadows are your enemy--they create darker shades of green that make it much more difficult to pull a good key. This diagram shows the setup for the first three lights.

You can also help get a clean edge on your subject by using a reflector--a white index card should work well--to put some light onto the rear of your subject. In effect, this creates a tiny, faint halo of light around your subject. If you do it right, the effect will be barely noticeable on camera, but it will make it far easier for the computer to determine where the edge is.

Hope this helps.

With all due respect Noodle, I don't want you here. - Ratboy Productions

Re: Green Screening

Bookmarked. Thanks guys! That gives me alot to work with and hopefully I should have a test soon.

Thanks a million!!
~TB

Caveman didn't discover fire, fire discovered caveman.

Re: Green Screening

Traditional Brickfilms wrote:

What kind of material should I use? Cloth? Posterboard?
How do I light the screen evenly as to avoid distortion?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
~TB

Most important is that screen is " mate" (or "mat" i don't know) and quite enlightened, light must be homogeneous but doesn't have to obstruct lighting of filmed subject.
http://s3.archive-host.com/membres/images/miniatures/1194795666/bonaventure_fichier_1.png http://s3.archive-host.com/membres/images/miniatures/1194795666/bonaventure_fichier_2.png

Last edited by zwan (June 27, 2009 (11:25am))

Re: Green Screening

i use very light/bright green posterboard for all of my greenscreening, but i need to work on lighting it better because i have a problem with all of my peices having a green tint to them...but other than that i would say that green posterboard works the best because for one of my movies i tried a blue cloth, and as you might expect it didn't turn out to great... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSODOah … annel_page this is an old movie mini/tongue

-flip