Hi, I'm Steve Washer with BrainyVideo.com. And you know, just about everyday
someone asks how we shoot
white screen--you know, to get that kind of infinity look.
And yeah, there are a lot of good reasons to learn how
to do white screen.
It's a very clean
and very bright
sort of canvas to work against.
It gives you a good place to put text beside you so it doesn't look all
junkie.
Oh, and speaking of junkie,
if you're not in a big studio and you're kind of in
closer quarters
then it gets rid of all that stuff that's behind you.
So yeah,
you know, it's really modern and bright.
So for that and other reasons,
it's really good to learn how to do white screen but
it's a little difficult to explain
how to do it in twenty seconds.
So I thought maybe the best thing to do
would be just to make a video about it. Because quite frankly there's a couple
of tricky things about white screen that are,
you know, that are tricky until you get your hands on them.
So come back in ten seconds
and I'll show you how to go from this to this.
So the first thing that we're going to need for our white screen shoot
is a white screen
or white photographer's paper.
Now, if you're in the U.S. you can just go to amazon.com and all kinds of
stuff will come up
for backdrops. If you're out of the U.S.,
just type in photo
video backdrops
and you'll be able to find all kinds of good backdrops, and pretty
inexpensive as well.
In fact a sheet like this,
which is, I think, twenty feet long by twelve feet wide
I think was only about forty dollars.
And the great thing about buying it
in a kit
from Amazon
is that you get these poles
that it sits on,
and then also this pole across the top
that it's suspended from.
Now, after you get
it hung
it's important to have it
with no wrinkles.
I can't tell you how important that is.
If you have any wrinkles in your backdrop and you light it, those wrinkles
are going to be even more prominent
So what you'll find is when you're on the site where you're buying the white
screen
you'll see something like, well, "people who bought this also bought,"
and it's going to be something like this--
a nice clamp.
And you use the clamp
to get rid of the wrinkles
at the ends
of the white screen,
just like this.
Very simple to use, but what about
the middle of the white screen? Well for that you can just go to the drug store
and get something like this little steamer dealy,
and it just goes, you know, up and down the white screen until you get rid of
all the wrinkles.
Very important to get rid of all the wrinkles.
Once the white screen is hung,
then the next thing that we have to do is look at our three important
distances.
That's what we have to set next--
the distance from the white screen to the lighting,
the distance from the subject
to the white screen,
and the distance from the subject
to the camera.
Let's take a closer look at that now.
Okay, so the first important distance
is the distance
from the lighting instrument
to the white screen. So let me explain where we are. Right now, we're looking at our
scene from the side. The camera is over here,
I'm here,
the white screen is over here,
and one lighting instrument that's lighting the white screen is here
and the other one is right here. So we're looking at this from this side.
Now, it's important to understand that your lighting instruments
that are lighting the white screen must be
behind you,
because if they're not, you're going to get
spill from that light
on yourself, and that's going to cause a problem. Number one,
you're going to be overexposed,
and number two
it's going to put you in silhouette
when you're looking at the camera out here.
And that's really not very helpful.
Unless, of course, you're in the Witness Protection Program and you're talking to
a reporter. "Hey, that guy, that corpse they found in my yard,
he just fell off the roof."
"From three towns away?"
"Well, I used to have a bigger house."
So, now that our distance from the lighting instrument
to the white screen is set,
let's look at these lighting instruments for a second.
Now this is a soft box that we're using here in the studio,
and a soft box
covers one-half of the screen while on the other side we have another soft box
that covers the other half of the screen.
But they're never going to cover the entire screen from top to bottom.
So if you're standing up,
you may want to raise this light a little bit on the stand
to get uniform coverage in the area where you're standing.
And then if you're sitting down, likewise, you want to just lower the whole thing on
the stand a little bit.
Now I use this DayFlo-FX fluorescent
lighting kit here
because for one thing,
it's a lot cooler, you know cooler to the touch,
than incandescent lights or halogen lights.
And these lamps are also daylight-balanced which is said to be better for
green screen.
And since white screen and green screen are kissing cousins,
it seems to work out pretty well. You can actually
even make a key out of that if you had to
and, you know,
put something else behind you--although that's not really the point of white
screen.
So that's pretty much how
this lighting works. Now the other option
is that you can create a pole--
just hang a pole from floor to ceiling--
and populate that pole
with about half-a-dozen, maybe eight of these particular lights.
And these are just ten dollar incandescent lights
that you can get at any hardware store.
Now it may or may not be less expensive to do it this way.
Certainly if you're handy and you don't mind the extra work,
and you don't mind the fact that
it's not portable, that you can't take anywhere,
then it may be a good option for you.
Last but not least--when you're setting up your lights,
don't forget to set up the light that separates you from the background.
And that's
the top light
right here.
Now this light
is attached to a C-stand,
a pretty sturdy C-stand right here,
and you don't
necessarily have to have a light like this,
and you should only have a light like this
if you have at least and eight-foot ceiling
and your under six feet high,
because you've got to have a little bit of room between you and the light.
So,
if you don't want to have a great big light like this and a great big C-stand like this,
then again, you can use one of these ten dollar
hardware store lights
and just attach this
to a lighting stand,
maybe along with some duct tape,
and put it behind you just out of sight of the camera.
So, the next distance that we have to set
is the distance from you, the subject,
to the white screen.
This is really critical. The important thing here
is not to get lit
by the same light that's lighting the white screen, which is over here.
We saw in the previous shot
that if there was light spilling on you
that that was not a good thing.
But the way to kinda mess that up
and get that light spilling on you again is to set yourself
too close
to the white screen.
And then you're still going to get over- exposed by this light
that's lighting the white screen, and we don't want that to happen.
So the way to make sure
that you're not lit by that light
is to make sure that you place yourself
so that you simply can't see the lamp.
And then you'll be fine.
Now, the last distance that we set is the distance from you, the subject,
to the camera out there.
And that's the easiest one of all to check.
So, just set it up
so that the whole white screen
fills the entire frame
and that way you can just move the lights around a bit until everything
looks right.
So what we want to do now is completely overexpose our background.
Now the tricky thing here is that if you have a camera
that has nothing but auto controls,
or a camera that has manual controls and you're just using all auto, you can't
do this, because what the camera will do
is take the brightest part of the shot
and try to make it look normal. And that's the last thing that we want to do.
Here, let me show you what I mean.
Ugh. And as I said, this can happen with a camera that has manual controls
but they're not even used.
So this is part of the price of admission to shooting good white screen.
And that's having of camera with manual controls that you actually use.
But how do you use those manual controls?
Well, let's look through the viewfinder and see what it's asking us to do.
So now the lights are set, the white screen is set up, and we're properly
composed,
and the light is even properly on the white screen.
So what's the problem? Obviously, the problem is that now we are too dark.
Well, we can fix that,
and this is where the real trick comes in.
We'd fix this by letting more light
into the camera.
And when we do that,
our background
goes super white,
and that's
what gives us that cool infinity look.
Well, I hope you enjoy your new white screen setup.
It's really pretty easy when you've got a few of the tricks under your belt and
you've got a few of the right materials.
And for more video tutorials like this one,
just check out our Youtube channel
or our blog.
That's it for me for now.
I'm Steve Washer
with BrainyVideo.com.
Happy shooting.