Lighting Your Greenscreen for Perfect Results

One of the biggest challenges of successfully working with a greenscreen is evenly lighting it. The screen itself requires its own lighting; independent from your foreground subject lighting.

The key is to evenly light your screen, while avoiding the creation of shadows. You preferably want your screen to represent a single, consistent colour.
Remember, because you’re trying to utilize the narrowest colour range as you can, shadows broaden the range, and are a contributor to diminished effects.
If you have shadows (darker colours), they might not be picked up by the camera, and as a result; those areas won’t be replaced. If you are working with
a low-budget setup, shadows become more difficult to stop due to the cheaper, less specialized materials used. This is why it is even that much more
important to make sure your lighting is as even as possible, especially when working with lower budget setups. Using a minimum of two lights (the more
the better), you should direct light inwards from either side, and from below; modify till you get the most even lighting. Using diffusion filters makes
a huge difference during this step. They greatly decrease the occurrence of shadows. Next, when you add your subject, you may notice the subject’s
foreground lighting casts shadows on the screen; you will need to readjust your screen lighting and filters for your screen colour evenness again.

When choosing a material for your greenscreen, always think about the lighting. Shiny materials yield bad results, as they reflect light and make replaced
areas seem paler. At the same time, shiny materials will cast shadows, causing darker areas to not be replaced in the result. What you want to look for is
a matte surface. Matte surfaces will diffuse light; causing even lighting across the entire material, and therefore, a narrower colour range. That is,
there will be less reflected light; paler outcomes, and less shadows; non-replaced outcomes. Some of the cheaper options when starting out are solids such
as cardboard or wood, painted green. Another option is a fabric such as canvas painted or dyed green. Imperfections such as creases, bumps or divisions in
your material are an enemy as they create shadows, and therefore imperfections in your resulting footage. If you choose fabric, make sure it is adequately
thick or dense, and doesn’t let light or its resting surface show through.

When shooting with your greenscreen, your subject is also a large factor in your lighting decision. You want to create a value difference between your
subject and your greenscreen. Usually a two stop difference (greescreen is two stops higher or lower than the subject) between the greenscreen and the
subject is preferable as a lighting difference. Im from Los Angeles / Hollywood and I have seen alot of errors. Please E-mail me if you have any questions or suggestions. Please visit my website.www.atomicstudios.com

Founded in 1992 by Phillip Guye in College park, Maryland, Atomic Studios started out as a very small graphic design house for the simple reason that he could not afford to pay the $60 per hour to have business cards, brochures, etc. designed for his limo service. He was only 18 years old, and because of insurance restrictions, he was not allowed to drive the limos. With all the books and video tapes he could buy, he sat in his office 18 to 20 hours, 7 days a week, answered the phones for his small limo service, and taught himself many aspects of graphic design such as color correction, compositing, 2 and 3D animation, website design and editing.

Before long, the graphic design house was doing more business than the limo service. In 2000, Phil decided to produce his own television show and moved to the Hollywood Hills to get real hands-on experience in production. When Phil moved, he did not go empty handed; he had already acquired over half a million dollars in production gear to aid in production of his show. While working for free about two years on every type of production you can imagine, from micro budget independent features to Spider Man Part 1, Phil, almost by accident, fell into the equipment rental business because most of the productions he worked on usually needed a lot more gear than they could possibly afford. Phil would then offer his more specialized gear such as remote hea crane, steadicam and/or high end camera packages to the producers at a price they could not refuse.

After Two years of working on these productions, Phil went into full swing with his own production company producing more than 20 of his own titles, including two television shows, two documentaries and many more titles. Because of all the production gear and graphic/post experience, over 90% of the production of all these titles was done in-house. His next step of course, was to find a distributor for all these titles. This is where the emergency break was pulled on a company that seemed to be headed for the stars.

We don't want to name the distributors involved, because there are two sides to every story, but the bottom line was that for whatever real or "creative" reason, Phil barely broke even on each of his titles that went through what is called a "distribution pipeline". After his titles went through this pipeline, sales not only stopped, but because of returns, sometimes went into the negative during the remaining three quarters. This type of creative accounting is the sole reason Atomic Studios and Distribution was started. At this point, Phil had almost two million dollars worth of production gear and if nothing else, plenty of experience with distribution.