Re: Advice for set decorations to work with lighting and green screen

Shiny surfaces are you enemy when it comes to green screen. The reason? The surfaces reflect some of the green, and your key shows up in those reflections. So you would want your table surface to be mat, not shiny, and preferably across the color wheel from green (reds, oranges, magenta, purple.)

But your ipods and computers will all have hard, reflective surfaces. Have some dulling spray and spray them well. (But beware of finger marks now showing up....)

Place your table and objects as far forward of the screen as physically possible. Note that you do not need to have the green screen cover to the edges of the frame unless you enter/exit during the shot, or your hands/arms cross to the edges. Block off with mat black (dubetine) as much of the green screen as you can on left, right, top, bottom. That will reduce the reflective possibilities. In post you can add in green ("garbage mat") the black parts, and then pull a clean key.

Give yourself and your objects a very soft, wide back light with some 1/4 or 1/8 minus-green (magenta.) Or else, place two 3/4 backlights (soft w/light magenta) on each side.

Beware of a shiny floor. It could kick green into the underside of your objects. Lay dubetine all over the floor behind you.

Since you are shooting yourself, you have a particularly difficult problem: no one to ride herd on the image and warn you of bad reflections.



Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
and part-time instructor lighting and camera
grad school, SF Academy of Art University/Film and Video
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com