Green Screen

For the beginning of our trailer, we wanted to put in a news report/montage of news reports in to talk about the background of the Klinger factory. For the news report to happen, we're using a green screen to give the effect of a professional news report with graphics in front of the news reader. We practiced with the green screen to find the best position of where to place the newsreader/where the camera should be. This took a while as we only wanted to see the head and shoulders of the news reader but we later then realised that this wouldn't really matter anyway because the news graphics would cover the bottom of the screen. Once we had the perfect position, we started to just use plain graphics i.e. a picture behind the newsreader to test the green screen - we realised that the newsreader should always keep still otherwise part of the green screen would show and this would not look very professional.

During the process, we learnt that a number of different things to make sure of/a number of processes we had to learn. These include:

Planning the studio set-up

• The green screen must be as flat and even as possible - if the green screen is creased in any way then it would damage the professionalism of the final product with the graphic(s) in the background where bits of green may pop up instead of the graphic.
• Never have anything in the background green or the person/people within the green screen where green, they will disappear into the background!
• We realised that we need to allow enough room to allow for any other equipment needed for the news report (this includes lighting, a table for the report etc.)

Editing the end product

Once we had finished filming the part of the news report, we had to use a technique called chroma keying. This is where we have to take out the whole of the green colour and once that has happened, we can place any picture possible behind the screen. You can either do this while filming but we decided it was better to create a chroma key during editing. The process goes as follows:

1) We placed the green screen footage on a layer in the timeline where we were editing.

2) We then placed a graphic image as the background on a layer below the green screen footage

3) We added a chroma key effect to the top layer (the original green screen footage)

4) After, we selected green as the colour to use in the key - this was really easy as an options button was very visible and this was at one click of a button.

5) The green in the screen had disappeared and the image that we decided to choose had appeared in the background.