How to Light A Green Screen

Tom: Utilizing a green screen for your productions can help raise the values of your video shoots. It’s going to take us four simple steps.

Step number one. We’re going to take a look at some simple best practices and some pre-planning that we could do when utilizing a green screen. Step number two. We’re going to look how the lights are subjects. Step number three. We’re going to light our green screen, and step number four we’re going to put the elements together and create our illusion.

I’m Tom Schuranzki and this is green screen lighting. Step number one is going to be our pre-planning process. We’re going to utilize these three Hollywood’s soft lights to help light our subject and to also light our screen, and we’re going to use this light our soft box light as our main key that’s going to provide the biggest source of illumination to that scene.

Now the other thing we need to pay attention is at the imaging sensor in these bad boys here is much more sensitive to green rather than red or blue. Now what’s going to happen if they do use the same color is that A, it will be used for comedic effect as you can see here. And B, it will illuminate the body from the picture or whatever area as covered by that color since we’re keying out the same color unfortunately, keys up the colors that are around the body as well.

Now the last part of this process is you’re going to make sure that your screen is void of repels and nice and smooth and very stretch out. The reason for this is because if you have repels, it will create small little shadows that will affect the color of your key.

Now we’re going to jump in the number two of this tutorial, and we’re going to talk about the light. The first thing we’re going to light is our green screen. We’re going to take two lights number one, right here and we’re going to move it just about 15 degrees in line with the green screen. Now, we’re also going to do that with the other light and the reasoning for this is so that these lights will light the screen independently, and also bounce the light into each other right after the green screen. This creates a nice, even screen void of any shadows, any repels such our screen is fold tight and it’s going to make a very easy for us to sample one color and make sure it stays consistent across the key. Let’s go and set up our green screen. Julie, I think you can help me out to slide over here. I grab this light.

So once we get our lighting just right you can notice that the reason we do this is because it allows us to separate this key and allows us the most control possible over the green screen. Now that we have our green screen set up we’re going to light our subject independently as we take a look at step number three. I’d like to bring in Julie one more time. We’re going to have Julie stand right about here, as you guys can see about three feet away from our green screen. She’s going to be our weather girl for this step using the techniques from three point lighting we’ll take the use of a key light and the use of a fill light to light our subject from both sides.

This soft box light we’re going to be using as our key light which is going to provide the main source of illumination for Julie here because we’re going to erase this about three or four feet higher than she is herself. So that it can reflect a more natural lighting scenario such as the sun bringing the light upon you. And the idea is to provide us a lot of light, and with our fill light we’re going to clean up the subject. We move our fill light in the place. We’re going to want it to be a little bit less intense than our key light and it’s going to spread a lot of soft light, and it’s going to cover our surface area more so than the key light which is going to kind of a little bit more harsh and more direct on our subject. Even though we are using a very powerful soft box light, but now if we come to our camera, and we look at our LCD screen we can monitor just how well she’s lit and we could see where the shadows are, and where the shadows shouldn’t be.

So now we have successfully lit our green screen and we have successfully independently lit our subject. The last part of the puzzle is to sell the effect, create the illusion. Since Julie is going to be our weather girl she’s going to need to act like she’s telling the weather. Therefore, when we put the graphic behind her of the actual weather map it looks like its one continuous shot. It looks like it’s been done live, and that’s the key here. Julie, act a way.

Julie: We have rigid low pressure coming down here which will bring some wind and cooler weather, but up here it’s going to be hot, hot, hot.

Tom: Utilizing this four simple steps, all of us can light a green screen. The first, just make sure that you, yourself are prepared. Number two, make sure you light the green screen and self and separate it from the subject which is step number three lighting a person using studio environment and number four make sure you sell the effect.


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