For some of our upcoming projects, we had to figure out how to use a green screen.  We don’t have a fancy studio… and we’re not balling out of control.  That didn’t stop us.

We headed to the fabric store and picked up nine yards of really bright green fabric.  We got the cheapest stuff on the shelf and it cost us about $50.  Then we had to go to another store to get thumbtacks.  We then stuck our fabric onto an open wall and tried to get it as wrinkle free as possible.

Lighting: This was probably the hardest part of the whole gig.  We found that by illuminating the green screen well, we would get rid of shadows, but then our subject was a bit too dark.  If possible, try to work in a well lit environment so that both the green screen and the subject is well lit.  When using lights, hit it from multiple angles to minimize shadows.

Filming: The first cut we did was Lief acting as though he had a hand resting on his hand.  He had to pretend like the hand was going to crawl up his arm to his shoulder.  The second shot, we got up close to just a hand and filmed it as though it was walking on a surface.

Editing: We used Adobe After Effects to modify the footage.  First, we took the footage of the hand and eliminated the green space.  You can do this by going to Effects>Keying>Color Range.  Use the eye-dropper tool in order to select the color.  Because our green screen wasn’t perfectly uniform, we had to add several hues of green to get the space around it completely blacked out.

Next, you need to add a mask so that you can cut the hand off at wrist.  Go to Layer>Mask>New Mask.  A yellow box will appear around the footage.  Use the arrow key and hit the corners of the box.  Drag the yellow box so that the hand is framed similar to the shot above.  Your hand is probably a bit large, so you may also want to shrink it, but you can do that after you import the other footage.

We imported our second video file, which is Lief pretending he has the hand on his shoulder.  Follow the same steps for color keying that we did for the hand.

We scaled the hand footage so that it was realistic.

Adding Keyframes: We had to make the hand move using animation key frames.  We basically had to move along the footage and add a position keyframe and a rotation keyframe along every couple frames.

Now our footage is pretty much done, but we decided to drop in a cool background.  We got this graffiti wallpaper off this French graffiti artist that goes by the name Mr. Stack.  We dropped this layer into the back layer of our footage and PRESTO.  We’re done!

This is one of those things that you can spend HOURS making better and better, but it all just depends on what you’re trying to do.  We hope this was helpful.