What is a Green Screen and How Does it Work?

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So we get asked a lot, what exactly is a green screen and how can I use it. The answer is you can use a green screen for just about any situation that you want to put a person in a different space than where they really are. See, a green screen is a background, and I could be standing on one right now and you would never know. Because how a green screen works is it’s a green wall, and in post-production, because I’m not wearing green and thankfully my skin isn’t green, we can actually tell the computer get rid of all that green, and it will basically just be me standing on an invisible plane.

Then in post-production, we can take any kind of background that you can think of, an office, a beach, anywhere, and we can actually put it in behind them and do some color correction to make sure that it looks like they fit on the space, and voila. They’ve been transported to wherever your mind wants them to be.

People might think, “How is this applicable to me? Why do I need to do it?” First of all, weathermen do it all the time. That’s how they get the map with the little green circles, telling you a tornado’s coming so you better get out. Or we’ve had people who were in an office that they weren’t really happy with the space and they didn’t really want to shoot there, and rather than spending lots of time and lots of money looking for the right office, we can put up a green screen right there in theirs so that we can put them wherever they want to be. We’ll find a great image, we’ll find even video sometimes to put behind people to really sell that they are in the environment that you want them to be.

So if you’re looking for a way to change where you are and transport your characters to a different dimension, we can do it with green screen.