green screen help

[khan488]

Need help figuring out the best tyoe of material to make a large green screen for a music video shoot. Im making a music video and through some great ideas gotten here from this forum I have decided to incorporate a green screen for some of the shots. Any ideas on on making a big screen: what type of material, reflection etc...

[machead]

How big do you need it?
Colorama and Savage do 9foot wide rolls
(paper) for about ?50

You could hire a studio with an infinity cove and paint it chroma green.

Or get some fabric and dye it.

[ThomasB]

I'm also interested in using a green/blue screen but don't know anything about it, actually... How are you going to insert the desired background then?

Thanks for any info

[wageslave]

film your actors (not wearing any green clothes), doing what they do, in front of a evenly lit green screen, and avoid shadow.

film a suitable background.

Import these both into Adobe Premier (or something else)

overlay the actors scene over the top of the
backgound scene.
apply chromakey transparency on the green, tweak the settings.
Voila it goes transparent revealing the background you want.

modern technology, aint it great.

"To another civilisation any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (para-quote)

[ThomasB]

Thanks for this information, Wageslave!

[hairbrain]

Something else worth bearing in mind when your doing a green screen shoot.....

Make the green screen as big as you can and position the actors as far away from it as you can. This will make sure that no green reflects off onto the actor. If you do get these reflections, called `spill`, then when you make the green transparent you will loose parts of your actors. For example... if your actor is wearing sunglasses and the green is reflected in them then you'll key out his sunglasses with the background. Also if your character is wearing white and the green is bouncing off onto his shirt the chances are you'll loose parts of his shirt.

Expensive solutions such as Ultimatte deal with spill quite well... but for a lower budget level you're best just taking precautions against it in the first place.

good luck

[khan488]

Thanks to eveyone for all the info, Its really helpful, I still need help with what type of maeterial to use for the actual backdrop. just dont; know where to begin.

Thanks a million

[robertshults]

Check out this site www.rivalquest.com

They have an entry somewhere on how to make a green screen with material from Walmart. It works. A friend used it for his sci-fi thesis flick and it was seemless. Just make sure to get a bright green or blue that could not possibly exist anywhere else in the shot.
www.filmtools.com sells "pro" green screens for massive amounts of money

[Kathy S]

One production I worked on had- some cheap hardwood painted bright gree. We held them up with clamps (and sometimes people) and filmed outside in bright sunlight- so need for lighting. And this was a chrysalis production for channel 4. Can't be bad. But it was for comedy lab. I also must say be careful on reflections and shadows

good luck

Kathy