Green Screen Practice

-Green Screen Practice-

Something that we saw very often in previous examples of A2 Media Music Videos was that they used green screen in order to overlay an image of their subject, often lipsyncing, onto a different setting or on top of some existing footage. Whilst, in some cases, this is used effectively, I believe that it detracts from the professionality of a narrative based music video and is used as more of a gimmick. However, this is only my personal opinion and there is probably a good reason why people use green screen in music videos, so as a result we decided we would attempt to incorporate at least a footage test of it onto this blog. 

The above video was more or a jokey take on a green screen, lending from a hit song. We took the footage of our subject, Alex, in front of the green screen in our Media Production Suite. We came to find that making the removal of the background look professional is a lot harder than you may expect, as you really have to focus on the way lighting reflects upon the green background. Using the two studio lights, we made sure that there were no visible creases in the screen and recorded our clip.

We then used ultra keying on Adobe Premiere Pro to remove all of the green from the clip, subsequently removing the background and producing a blanked image other than our subject. We then found a clip on youtube to act as the background and placed it on our timeframe. We then used feathering to make the clip more smooth, as we could see the edges of the green screen in the clip. After this, we found that due to movement of the green sheet, the clip was ruined. Due to this we decided to mask the subject and then apply a key, which allowed us to produce the above result. 

As you can see, due to the fact our subject is moving, there is some interference between the clip and the background. This is one of the main reasons we do not want to incorporate a green screen into our production - to have it look perfect you have to really concentrate on reducing movement and maximising the lighting, something we do not believe we can achieve. Also, as a group we have decided we would much rather focus on practical effects in our video (as we are using fire and smoke grenades and not CGI) as this is what will make it stand out - and using a green screen would contradict this.