As our clients’ demand for interactive video has increased dramatically in the past two years, we’ve been able to build great experience with shooting video against a green-screen, also known as chromakeying.

Chromakeying is the process of shooting a subject in front of an evenly lit, green (or blue) background, also called a green-screen composite image. During the post-production phase, the solid-colored background can be replaced with another image, video or animation.

Traditionally, production crews have shot against blue backgrounds because it is complementary (occupying an opposite position on the color wheel) to skin tones and therefore easiest to edit out. Blue has also been a popular choice because traditional film is most sensitive to blue light, again making it easier to remove. However, with today’s video effects software, such as Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut, etc…, any color can be “keyed out”. It is important that whatever color you are using in the background is complementary to your subject. If your subject is green you obviously don’t want to have a green background.

After choosing the appropriate background color for your video shoot, you have to make sure your scene is evenly lit. One of the challenges for any green-screen video shot is usually where the subject touches the floor. For instance, if you have a person standing in front of the green-screen, even though the background and subject are as evenly lit as possible, you will get a darker shadow where the subject’s feet touch the floor. This area will need the most tweaking in post-production to get a nice, quality key.

For one of our latest projects, we asked the Buddy Group in Irvine for help and rented one of their green-screen studios. The Buddy Group helped set up the lights, cameras and made sure we got the best possible footage. It’s hard to determine the quality of your “key” until you actually import the footage and start removing the background in your editing software. To ensure the best results, we did a couple of test shots, and imported the footage right on location, straight into one of our Apple Powerbooks so we could test the key quality before starting the actual video shoot.

After ensuring that we had a quality key, the rest of the shoot was a very smooth process. 8 hours later, we walked out of the studio with a hard drive containing all the footage and were able to start the editing and post-production process the very next day.

Here are a few behind the scenes shots from our greenscreen video shoot for CBRE’s Project Insight microsite: