The lean, mean, green screen. James Hedgecock

Good afternoon to you all.

This post is just basically to show you what we've been practising in the last couple of media lessons - working with our newest technological asset, the green screen.

Below you'll see some screenshots of the results of our green screen photography and editing sessions on Final Cut, with a few evaluative comments on the task.  



Here's Tanaka looking remarkably calm for someone who's being chased by an avalanche. As you can see on the left, there are still some green stripes which proved difficult to edit out, even after extensive tinkering with the options on the 'Chroma Key' effect - adjustment of the hue, saturation and luma helped to get rid of most of the green screen, although some bits are slightly visible. In the final image with the background replacing the green screen, however, these areas are less obvious.

Now here's Gabriel joining a scene from 'The Great Gatsby'. Again, some areas of green that proved tricky to edit out are visible, but are less obvious in the final image. One reason the green screen proved tricky to edit out was due to the colour of Gabriel's green hat - if we didn't widen the spectrum of green that would be removed enough then the green screen would show too much, but if we let the tool remove all greens then Gabriel's hat would disappear - so we had to reach a compromise with these.  

This is me on set with the sharks from 'Finding Nemo', including Bruce in the middle. This one came out pretty well with some tinkering, save for a very small green halo about my head. It had been quite noticeable but after having a fiddle with the luma and saturation its visibility had been minimized. we also cropped my bottom half to give the effect that I could either be just treading water or swimming with my body behind me. So now it looks like I'm swimming with sharks. In a hoodie. Looking unusually dry.

Here's...Gabriel, believe it or not, although obviously not as we know him, doing a spot of kung-fu fighting, with a kung-fu fighter. Except we kind of took half of him, then inverted that and put it on top, using the 'mirror' effect. And the end result is a headless human four-legged spider thing, that wears jeans and skate shoes, because that's completely normal. This also worked quite well with the green screen, the only slightly dodgy areas being around his footwear.



This is a screenshot of when we had the task of acting as though we were members of a band (with me pretending to be the lead singer, oh dear...) in front of the green screen, with the idea then being to put the background of a stage setting behind us. The purpose was just to test out what advantages/disadvantages there would be of using the green screen for band shots in the final video, and what problems we ran into. So, as you can see, we left a fluorescent tube light on above the top of the green screen we were using which made the colour much brighter at the top, meaning it was hard to edit out and it's still sticking out like a sore thumb at the top - so we'll need to make sure only the lights level with the camera with umbrella diffusers are turned on. Also, the green screen didn't completely fill the shot so you can see on the left edge that there's a bit of wall visible by Tanaka's head. We'd also need to plan the shot more carefully in the real thing, as you can see that Tanaka's right side is not in the shot, and we're only viewed from the waist up - so we'll need to take the shot so the whole of us can be seen, and we can make it look as though we're actually standing on the stage. Also, some more tinkering with the colour/saturation/hue controls needs to happen, as each of us in the shot has a small yet noticeable bright green halo.

So there you have it, some of the results from our fooling around - no, sorry, highly constructive yet enjoyable green screen sessions!

Will be back with you on the next post!

James, on behalf of JTS Productions