- For decades now, green screen has been a big part
of making movie magic.
With a few basic filmmaking tools and good technique,
just about any filmmaker can transport their talent
from a bland green backdrop in their garage
to just about any scene they can imagine.
But before we can even get to the step
of dropping in a cool background in post,
we have to first set up and light our green screen right
or we won't be able to finish pulling off the illusion.
So let's start with the basics we need
in our green screen kit.
The most important thing of course
is the actual green screen itself.
You can get a professional chroma key green screen
from just about any film equipment vendor.
The professional chroma key screens will likely
be a little more durable and designed with grommets
or other features that make them more practical
and easier to set up.
However, you can get a green screen effect
from just about any material as long
as it's the right color green.
If you comb through your local fabric store,
you're likely to find some obnoxious, bright green fabric,
possibly even in the bargain bin, that will serve fine
as a homemade green screen.
Alternatively, you can get some green chroma key paint
and just paint a wall to serve as a green screen.
And if suddenly pressed with the need to shoot green screen
on the fly, with a little imagination and creativity,
you can even make a functional green screen out of a bunch
of sheets of carefully-taped fluorescent green
poster board or paper.
But for now, I'm gonna just deal with green screen cloths
since the lighting technique is the same for all
of these different types of screens
and cloth green screens are the most common method
for indies and what I suspect most of you will be using.
The next most important element in our setup are the lights.
You're gonna want at least three lights, two lights to put
on either side of the green screen background
and at least one light for your subject.
To be clear, three lights is the bare minimum.
I recommend four or more lights for best results
as you can then also add a hair light or fill light
to your setup as I'll show you in a bit.
Now, you can use just about any type of light
to light a green screen but you wanna make sure
that whatever source you use is soft and big.
The bigger and softer the light, the better
to create smooth, even lighting that covers
the whole green screen.
Because they fit the bill of big and soft,
fluorescent units like Kino Flos are a popular favorite
for professionals lighting green screens.
These fluorescent units cast a lot of bright,
soft light across the broad area.
So that makes them perfect for green screens.
So I definitely use 'em if you got 'em.
Another good choice for green screen lighting
is any light with a soft box.
Low refill lights or any other hard light source,
outfit it with the Chimera or other soft box
will do the job just fine.
Similarly, LED units like light panels, one by ones,
or just inexpensive photo flood scoop lights
with ample diffusion will also work.
Apart from making sure your light source is soft and broad,
you also wanna use lights of the same type
and color temperature on both sides of your green screen.
Now, if the lights you use to light your subject
are a different type or color temperature,
that's not that big a deal as long as the lights
on your green screen match each other.
So green screen and lights are our main ingredients
but we also need to mount our green screen.
For that, we'll need a professional backdrop stand
designed to hold cloth backdrops or we'll need two C stands
with an interlocking crossbar.
The last thing we'll also need are some gaffer's tape
and spring clamps to help secure and hold
our green screen tight.
Now that we've got all our lights and materials together,
we're ready to light this bad boy up.