Research and Development Journal (Green Screen introduction)

A green screen is one of many methods used in film and even television of making the impossible, possible.

Using a green screen is a cleaver way of deception for the audience. One minute a person who looks like they are behind a wall of green would be instantly transported to another point in the world even though in reality they really haven't gone anywhere.

One crucial thing about working a green screen is that when you are in a studio you must have a positive amount of light surrounding the character or item you're filming.  Other wise when you are keyframing the clip you are editing the amount of cropping out the green will become either a tougher job or clip won't work altogether and you will have to reshoot the whole thing again.

But what is keyframing?

Keyfaming is part of the action of attaching a specific parameter value to a character or an object at a specific point in time.

From a studio point of view this example is from the hit american television show Whole Line is it Anyway with a segment which they call "Newsflash". For this game they has a presenter in front of a green screen and with the help of 2 other anchors the person who is presenting has to guess what clip is playing behind them.

Before watching take note of how much light there is surrounding on of the cast (Colin Mochrie):

Figure 1. Whose Line: Colin Newsflash (2008) [screenshot] At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXT6foyWZCw (Accessed on 13/10/2015)


There is a lot of strong light surrounding Colin but it is to the point when you do not see his shadow on the screen. This also helps with the process of editing as it helps when there is no shadow in the screen itself before filming thus the cropping action of the keyframing editing will be a lot faster and easier.

Whose Line is it Anyway? : News Flash - Colin [television program online] Hat Trick Productions Warner Bros Television Riverside Productions (1998) 4 mins 19secs At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYUUOI4IOFQ (Accessed on 13/10/2015)


Another example which I have done is a piece of work I've filmed recently with a friend who said that he wanted to make a music video and wanted a green screen to be involved. I knew another friend of ours who was happy to help who had a curtain green screen that could cover the whole body of my friend.

This example is different as we were using natural light (outside not in studio) to shoot my friend behind this green screen.

The only thing that could have gone better is that our screen was very creased and was really clean and straight like other screens, when using a green curtain you need to make sure that it is completely straight as possible other wise the editing process will take longer or like before you might have to reshoot all over again.


But this was the editing process of the video when using the editing system final cut pro X:


1. First there is your video with the green screen on the time line.

2. Next go into effects and select the category (Keying)

3. select Keyer effect

4. Drag and drop the Keyer effect on the video which has the green screen

5.  With the green gone, now comes the fun part, showing the media you want to see behind your character. Next when you have your piece of media drag and drop it onto the timeline. Make sure it goes below your green screen video so that way it shows on the clip you are editing from.

6. Now to get rid of the background surrounding my character, using the crop tool i can cut out the surrounding area of my character without damaging him.

Then all there is to it is to clean up your video with the options given to you in the Keyer effect and this was my end result...

Lastly comes the studio production which my group has done, this is a practice before we come to do this programme live for our news brief project.

We had one of our group be the presenter in the studio and we had to do a segway into a pre recorded package.

So in the studio we made sure that our peer (Patricia Dixon) was lighted perfectly before we began, we also gave her a script to read from. Afterworld we went outside where I was to be a reporter for our quick pre recorded package. After our quick workshop and editing this was a draft of our show so far...