Working with Green Screens

As the technology of the motion graphics industry has become more advanced, new areas of expertise are falling underneath the umbrella of a motion graphics designer. Green screen keying, or chroma keying, is one such area that motion graphics designers need to be masters in. Feature films, local news, video production and even video games are utilizing green screens more and more.

We are going to explore the basic principles of green screens this week. Through our conversation, you will learn how to use green screens in the production environment and also how to remove the screen in After Effects. The process can be relativley easy, if the green screen is filmed correctly, so we will cover how to light a green screen as well.

Project Due: Week 14

Working with green screen elements can be a lot of fun, but they can be problematic if they are not filmed correctly. In this project, you will composite the green screen actor in to a series of computer generated background plates. Be careful to garbage mask the actor before you pull the chroma key. Remember, we only care about the pixel immediately surrounding the actor, so the extraneous material in the green screen plate can, and should, be removed. You will need to spend some time animating the garbage mask to ensure that no part of the actor is accidentally cut-off by the mask. Once you are happy with the articulation of your garbage mask, begin to add the other computer generated film plates in the composition. Please ensure your project includes the following required elements before you complete this assignment:

The fantastic folks down at Hollywood Camera Work have developed an excellent training module on green screen effects. The raw green screen footage and finished example can be downloaded from their website. check it out!

Or, you can download the assets for the homework here:

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Embassy Showdown dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:

Project Due: Week 14

How we work with the green screen tools in After Effects is directly dependent on how the green screen plates were filmed. In this exercise, you will remove the green screen from 3 different green screen plates. Each shot will provide you with a uniques challenge to overcome. When you are finished with each one, please render each shot separately using the H.264 codec.

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Green Screen Lab dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions: