How Does A Green Screen Work?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. ANSWERS.
What exactly is a green screen and why do we use one? Does it even have to be green?
Video Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of Lights. Camera. Answers. I'm Jeffrey and today we're talking all about green screens.
You may know a green screen from when you've seen a weather forecaster get cut out of a background to put a weather map behind them. That's basically what the green screen is. It allows us to take a subject, usually somebody being interviewed, and put them in front of really whatever background we'd like.
Why is this useful outside of something like a news forecast. Well you might have somebody like a CEO who is not realistic to travel them to a remote location or you want them to be on a shop floor, but it's crazy noisy on the shop floor so you need to film them on the green screen and then artificially put that shop floor behind them.
Those are easy examples, but the list goes on and on of why sometimes it's easier to do a green screen versus put them in the actual environment. Sometimes you'd cycle in 10 people really fast and they all need to be in different spots. Well, with a green screen that's totally fine.
A green screen needs really good lighting. You'll notice when we do green screen shoots we deploy lots of lights around them so on camera that green screen will not have any shadows or shading to it. You really want when you look through the camera lens, and ultimately work with it in post you want to look like you're almost looking at a pure green background.
And it's important to note when we keep talking about it being green, it doesn't have to be green. If you need somebody to wear green on camera where it would be green on green and that's bad, you can always make that background blue or red or any other solid color as long as it's not a color that appears on the outfit they're wearing that's fine. We can cut it out just the same though green's always the default.
Well, that's what green screens are. That's why we use them. And thanks for joining us for another episode of Lights. Camera. Answers. I'm Jeffrey and we'll see on the next one.
