How To Light A Green Screen For Filmmaking | The Ultimate Guide

here there dancing in between the life [Music] there's no space for me [Music] you're so pretty when you're on your knees [Music] all right people let's get into it I am Garrett and today is part one of two in our next chapter of how to light and this is how to light green screen everything that we're shot in this particular title sequence was all shot in a green screen studio and composited to make it look the way that it does and we're going to talk about each of the individual scenes that we needed to film because we had to light all of them completely differently but before we even get into that we need to talk about green screen Lighting First the first and single most important thing whenever we are working with green screen is to make sure that our background is both bright and evenly lit if our background is not illuminated bright enough right or exposed bright enough it is going to be very difficult to light our foreground in a way that is going to get the light Behavior how we want it so it needs to be lit quite bright the other piece that we need to make sure is that there are not any hot spots or dark spots in our background the more even the lighting that we can create the better off we will be so if you are working with a pop-up or you are working with a backdrop two very important things to note is that you will get more even light by pulling that light away when our lights are too close to our backdrops is where we're going to start to see hot spots and we're going to start to see dark spots so we want to pull those lights away from that back backdrop so then that way we can get a larger more even spread of light it's also helpful to have light coming from more than one direction especially if you're working with muslin fabric because muslin fabric can very very easily become wrinkled and wrinkles create Shadows Shadows create dark spots and that's going to make it more difficult to key the more even and bright we can illuminate our green screen the easier time we're going to have compositing in post and like with everything we're going to talk about today the more work we do on the front end the easier it is for us on the back end if we don't take the time to do the work now editing compositing and coloring is going to be very very difficult so light bright and light even the second principle when lighting for green screen is Spill and how to avoid it the best way we can avoid spill is to make sure that our subjects are pulled as far away from our background as possible while still maintaining enough green screen in the frame to block our subject if we're too far away obviously our subject is going to be clipped around the green screen depending on the size of the screen that we're working with and it's going to make compositing much more difficult because you're going to have to Roto everything so we do want to make sure that there's green entirely around our subject but if we are too close to the green screen especially because we've already made sure that our green screen is lit bright and it is lit evenly we're going to get a lot of green spill falling onto our subjects and the more spill we have on our subjects the harder it's going to be to pull a clean key so making sure that we pull our subject off of the background or as far away from the background as we can while maintaining the proper framing is going to ensure we eliminate as much spill as we can now in our case because we were filming in a psych Studio there was green everywhere right it was 90 degree walls it was on the floor it was all over the place so in our case we did of course pull our subject as far away from the background as we could but then we also mitigated the spill by bringing in negative fill on the sides and on the floor so we could eliminate as much of that bounced spill as we could foreign the third principle for getting a good clean shot is to make sure that we have a fairly long aperture we don't want to shoot with a shallow depth of field right or with our lens wide open and that's because shallow depth of field creates obviously blur or bokeh right and the more blur we have again the more difficult it is going to be to properly key that shot so by creating a longer depth of field right by closing down our lens and having a longer aperture on it is going to make sure that more of our subject is going to be tack sharp and the more tack sharp our image is going to be the easier it's going to be to key light bright and even separate your foreground from your background to eliminate spill and then of course make sure that our aperture is longer than you otherwise would to ensure that you're getting nice crispy edges last thing it's not like a full principle but just to kind of thing to keep in mind is make sure when you are setting the exposure of your camera you're working with your camera settings to get the right exposure for your shot make sure that your camera is exposed for your background you want that green to be coming in right at that neutral 50. the reason we want to expose for that is if it gets too hot or if it gets too dark again pulling a key is going to be really tough so setting your exposure there and then adjusting your foreground and subject lighting accordingly is going to make sure that you get a really really clean key if our foreground lights are too bright and we adjust for that our background is going to go too dark keying is going to be tough if our foreground lights are not bright enough right for our background then we're going to get a nice green but we're actually not going to get our subject lit or illuminated in a way that's going to feel like they belong in the world that we're putting them the first setup we're going to break down is our fire scene once we had our background evenly lit and bright and our camera exposed to that we've pulled our subjects away from that background as far as made sense and put moving blankets on the floor with the black fabric facing up this does two things for us the first thing that it does is of course eliminate any green spill that may be coming up onto our subjects from the green floor we then did it with the black side up because I wanted to pull light away from our subjects because if we are going to be filming them in front of an inferno they are going to be heavily backlit with not a lot of light bouncing back up onto them we then took two large duveteen sheets hung them on backdrops which I believe were about eight foot by eight foot and we put that between the camera and our subjects serves two purposes here the duveteen acted as a negative fill again pulling light off of our subject so they're not getting a lot of light from the studio back bounced onto them but but also it acted as a flag because what we then did is we took two one by one hard Gemini lights which are insanely incredibly bright one foot by one foot LED lights and we've shown those back at our talent in kind of a reverse key position the duveteen acted both as a negative fill and as a flag for the camera from these lights we didn't put any modifiers on the lights we wanted the light to behave like fire and because the one by one Gemini's are rgbww and can be programmed with effects I could plug in the exact fire effect that I wanted and put those lights opposite our talent now if somebody is standing in front of a blazing Inferno while they are going to be backlit and almost silhouetted there is going to be light wrap right the light that kind of comes around the body of the person to where it's not a true silhouette but we're going to see a little bit of the shape around them and in order to achieve that in studio we'll we did is we took these two one by one Gemini's and we pointed them at the opposing Talent right so the one light that was on camera left was then going to be pointed at the talent on camera right and then the light on camera right was pointed at the talent on camera left and by doing that by kind of crossing the light and making an X through it as opposed to pointing them at their respective sides it then helps create some of that light wrap for each of the other Talent this then gives us the ability to emulate what a large fire would look like of course with just using two lights in a studio environment now this brings up a very crucial part of green screen filmmaking we need to know what the background environment is going to be that we're placing our subjects inside of that's why we leaned on today's sponsor Film Supply Film Supply is the leading platform for exclusive authentic and cinematic footage from award-winning filmmakers they license footage from incredible filmmakers who are wrapped by production companies like pretty bird stink Anonymous content and more it's the most curated footage licensing platform out there they have everything organized by shoots and scenes so whether you need the same Talent across multiple locations or you need more than one angle of a particular subject it'll fit seamlessly in your edit they have tools like hover scrub and quick preview so you can find what you're looking for even faster and if you can't find what you're looking for or you're short on time their team will track it down for you for free through their complimentary footage research you can license footage for your projects like I did with what you saw in the title sequence today licensed cinematic footage from Film Supply by clicking on the link in the description of this video all of the background elements all of the environments all of the compositing that we put our talent into is all footage licensed through Film Supply so if you want to check them out what they have to offer or incorporate some high quality footage into your next project of course links are in the description below now if you want to know how we composited this to make it of course look like it's real fire uh make sure that you are subscribed for part two because part two we are going to be diving into the edit and compositing of this title sequence with fire now complete and out of the way we are going to our second setup which is the opposite of Fire water for this again we took Film Supply footage we knew the general look and feel of how this was going to be on camera and we wanted to emulate the same lighting style that we would have if somebody were out the ocean light is coming from a single Direction and in this case it is top down right because of course surface of the water the Sun is up there you're underneath that is top down lighting so to emulate that we took those same duveteen sheets those eight foot by eight foot double team sheets and instead of having them perpendicular to the camera we put them parallel to the camera to sandwich our subject in our frame again this is to eliminate both spill and to act as a negative fill to pull light away from the sides of our subject to keep it very focused on our top down we took our one by one Gemini hard threw it in a snap bag with a grid but it's like a soft box but you don't have to put diffusion on it in this case we just wanted the directional light threw that on a combo stand put that overhead of our talent had it lit to Daylight balanced light and that was our main key light now again going back to separating our foreground from our background we then of course could also use an edge light this is called a crown light hair light cut light backlight there's a lot of names for it they all do slightly different things but in the end the idea is to separate our form ground from our background and for that we took a double rainbow it's a four foot tube light it is an incredibly beautiful light fixture created by Quasar science we put that up and over our subject from behind so then that way again it would reinforce the overhead lighting but create that really nice sharp separation between our subject and the background with the lighting in place I could then move the camera around to get our overhead shot to get our head on shot all the other things that we may need for this knowing that the behavior of our lighting environment would emulate being underwater setups three and four are different than one and two one and two we were putting people into environments and three and four we are going to be putting environments into people it's a little different right in photography we would call that double exposure Photography in video it's not quite the same especially when we're talking about uh shooting digitally but the effect that we can create is quite similar if you want to see how we composite and edit our footage to look that way uh make sure that you hit that little bell icon because of course we're going to be talking about that in part two which is how we edit and composite for that all that to say our third setup is for the woman with the broad hat anytime we're talking about a large hat or anything that is going to be that close to a person's face and create that big of a shadow we need to be mindful of not only the intensity of that shadow but the behavior of the light that creates the shadow right we want this to be attractive on our subject so we don't want really hard really harsh lines coming from our shadows so to do that we need a very large surface area light which is going to then create a very soft light which is still going to give us the contrast that we want in our shadows without the ugly nature of a hard-line shadow so to do that we took a three foot by six foot bounce board and we took that up on c-stands up and over our subject and we took both of our one by one hard Gemini lights and we blasted light into that bounce board from kind of either side coming up and what that does is that a one by one light on its own is a relatively small surface area light which means that it is generally going to produce kind of hard light as the name would imply but by taking those two one by one lights and Shining them up into a three foot by six foot surface area we could then create a single visual of our lighting fixture and that then is going to produce much softer much more even lighting which is great but we didn't want it to all be soft we did of course want to still have some really nice edges on there because that contrast is how you create this double exposure effect if it's all all even and all soft you're not going to get really nice Double Exposure effects out of it so to get a really nice hard Edge light we took an Astra 6X we put that kind of 30 degrees behind our subject took it all the way up on a c-stand shown it down and that gave us a really really nice Edge light which kind of cut across the shoulder and the neck of the woman with the broad hat which gives us that really nice crunchy contrast So Soft light contrasted with harsh light the fourth setup effectively works the same way as the third but instead of being for the woman with the broad hat we now are working with the man with the headphones and then of course our final frame which is the man yelling directly into the camera and because that's the hero shot we really needed that shot to sing so we sat our talent down at a neutral colored table in this case it was a light gray table and depending on the shot we either left the table gray as being a neutral bounce or we took that bounce card we used from earlier and set it on to the table to then have a white bounce coming up onto our subject we then created a floppy I didn't have any on set so we took two two by three frames and we took that black uh moving blanket that we used before to create the floppy which is essentially just a framed overhead uh flag with then a drape kind of down the side which acts as a multi-access negative fill right or a flag so in this case we wanted to pull light off of the entire side of one face to again build that contrast from one side to the other we then took the key light which of course is our one by one hard put it back into our snap bag which is that soft box through I believe a quarter stop of diffusion over that along with our grid and pointed that down at our subject always use grids grids are amazing for multiple things one they don't change the behavior of the light they just eliminate spill so that way we can have the type of light that we want in this case directional but soft light without having to worry about that light bouncing all over the place and creating too much evenness through bounce so putting the Grid on it helped Focus that light and then having that floppy on the other side again allowed us to have that contrast between the two opposite our key we put that Astra 6X again to act as our cut light or our back light just to give us some nice edges around our subject on that same Shadow side we'll get more into this in part two but uh for setups three and four the reason we filmed those on a green screen is because in order to get your double exposure effect you need to have really clean mats and to get clean mats when pulling off of original footage that's just shot out in the world can be quite tough so we can eliminate a lot of the work needed for a double exposure shot by starting with a green screen environment which is going to immediately create those nice clean mats for us so when you are lighting green screen make sure that your green screen is lit evenly pull your lights away to make sure that they're getting more spread to evenly light it make sure that you're buying the brightest most accurate light to your budget can afford because you want to light that green screen quite bright setting the exposure of your camera to that green screen to make sure that's hitting that neutral 50 and then adjusting your foreground lighting accordingly pull your subjects as far away from that background as makes sense for your shots so that way you can eliminate as much spill as possible using Flags duveteen negatives are just as important as the lighting fixtures that you are using creating that contrast is what matters so make sure that you're flagging things off make sure that you are using duveting or some form of black fabric for your negative fills floppies Cutters frames whatever you are going to be using make sure that you have access to negatives just as much as you do to lights know what your backgrounds are going to be what the environments are going to be this is going to help with how you light it how you frame it what the composition is what your blocking is what your lensing is if we don't know the environments that we're going to be putting our subjects in lighting them in a way that is going to make it believable for the final shot becomes almost impossible and lastly make sure that you have really long apertures to make sure everything in your frame is nice and crunchy this is part one I know that we've gone over a lot in part two we are going to be talking about editing and compositing so if you are interested in how you then take green screen footage and make it into something that looks really nice and really believable uh stay tuned for part two if you liked this video do me a favor give this video a like subscribe if you haven't already hit that little bell icon so you know when part two is coming and comment down below other things that you would like us to go over on how we light and as always I'll see you in the next episode [Music]

Channel: Garrett Sammons

Views: 21,080

Keywords: green screen, green screen setup, how to light a green screen, green screen lighting, green screen tutorial, how to green screen, chroma key lighting setup, filmmaking tutorial, green screen setup for youtube videos, green screen setup lighting, green screen setup tour, green screen fire, green screen setup tutorial, how to light a green screen with two lights, how to light a green screen for video, how to light a green screen properly, how to light a green screen at home

Id: Gg9PMQvVXvc

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022