From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Photography and DSLR Video

Setting the room

From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Photography and DSLR Video

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Setting the room

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Rich Harrington: So before we start shooting green screen, I just want to talk a little bit about the room. And you see here, we are in a pretty big space, and that's kind of important. Abba, why do we need this much space? Abba Shapiro: Well, we need this much space for a couple of reasons. First of all, for the green screen alone, the more space you have the better it is because you can really control the distance of the talent to your camera to the green screen. Rich: If I've got my green screen here, that's great. We're going to want to go ahead and step forward a little bit and put our subject in, because if our subject is too close to the green screen, he or she is going to get spill reflecting onto them, so that's great. But then we have to go in front of that to put our cameras, so there's going to be cameras up there that we're shooting with the still cameras, the video cameras, because we need some distance between our subject, making things even more complex, we have cameras shooting us today. So, it's kind of like the camera shooting, the camera shooting the subject, shooting the fake background, so we need a lot of space. So when you are doing green screen, I think the biggest problem people have is they shoot in small rooms and they put their subjects right up on the screen. Abba: Right, and that's a real problem because then you have to deal with shadows and reflection. Really, the larger and longer space you can get, the easier it is to actually not only shoot your green screen but then to composite it. Rich: Yeah, so look for a big empty room if you have access or perhaps a conference room, but the big thing is don't let that subject get too close to the backdrop, otherwise, there is going to be Chroma spill and the green or the blue will bounce back on to them. Abba: So, this is a pretty good space, and there's one more thing you should keep in mind, if you are used to shooting just stills, video is a whole different animal because you have to deal with sound and have to deal with audio, so when you select the room, if it's in a warehouse where you're hearing dump trucks all over the place, you're not going to get good audio. So don't just think about lights and space, also listen to the room, so you can hear how it sounds. For when you bring your talent, you don't have to fight that noise. Rich: Yeah, and that's always the tough thing, finding a good space. But if you look around, and you need a studio space, you could usually find one in a local market or work with other places. Sometimes you'll find places that are huge like a gymnasium. If you go there off hours, you might have access to it, but with green screen, you need that big open space. Well, we we've got an idea here. It's a big empty room, and I think what we need to do now is start setting up the backdrop, so you see how the green screen process works.

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