How to light for green screen

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Garrett SammonsGarrett is the Creative Director at Nice Shirt Media and part-time film professor. With a primary focus on commercial cinematography, he also creates narrative and documentary films.

Written by Garrett Sammons

My name is Garrett Sammons, a commercial director and cinematographer. In this next blog post, I will walk you through how to light for green screen and create a Hollywood-quality title sequence using compositing techniques.

Lighting is the most important factor to make high-quality film with green screen. So, in this post, we will examine how to create an HBO-style opening sequence for a fictitious show using green screen and compositing techniques. We will dive into how to light for final environments, separating foregrounds from the CYC wall, and the basics of compositing green screen elements. Let's get into it!

Final Title Sequence

When would you use green screen? Green screen is a great tool to achieve an effect that would otherwise exceed your budget, set design, timeline, or other resources. Rather than needing to go out and film in a crazy environment or film a cool effect, you can add those things digitally in post instead. Green screen is also great for adding text to a shot or for achieving a double exposure or double composite.

Universal concepts for lighting green screen There are a few basic lighting concepts to remember whenever you are lighting green screen, regardless of how you use it. When lighting for green screen, the first basic rule is to make sure you have even lighting across the entire screen. You need the background to be as evenly lit as possible. This ensures the chroma key is as even as possible and there is no unwanted shadows or light spill.

If you don't properly expose for that background, the grain can be too hot and bleed into some of the skin tones or it can be too dark and bleed into the shadows. Failure to evenly light your background will make pulling the keys in the composites more difficult in post. So, first and foremost, make sure you have even lighting on the background environment and the camera is properly exposed to that lighting.

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To achieve even lighting, you can use bright, large spread lights like the ones I used for this project. These lights also have adjustable settings that help you achieve certain effects with a green screen.

Furthermore, you'll want to pull your subject as far away from the green screen as possible while still maintaining the shot you are aiming for. This can also help reduce any green screen spill and create a better sense of separation between the subject and the background.

Lastly, the light spread will be affected by how close or far the light sources are from the green screen. Remember, it isn't just about having a bright light, but it is also about having a very evenly spread light. Pulling lights further from the green screen will create a larger spread and therefore a more even key. Alternatively, the closer the lights are to your green screen, the more focused the beam angle will be and therefore the more uneven it will be lit.

Remember these basic principles as we dive into the scenes from the intro sequence below.

Simulating a fire with a green screen Let's look at this first scene. Here, we had two people standing in front of a green screen in the studio and we added the bonfire effect in post.

We did this by lighting the talent with two Gemini 1 1 Hards set up opposite them, known as reverse key. One camera is set to be very bright, and another is set to the built-in fire feature. This gives a lot of bright, hard light that would exist if they were truly standing in front of a fire.

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In this set up, we also placed two black, negative fill blankets on the ground to prevent any green from spilling up onto our talent. The blankets also helped suck some of the light off of the talent to help give us the end silhouette look we wanted.

Our intro sequence was shot in a green screen studio to make this easier for us, but if you're using a pop-up green screen or muslin, you'll need to worry more about lighting the background evenly and eliminating any wrinkles or shadows. To do this, I would place two Gemini 1 1 Hards on 45-degree opposing angles to help offset some of those wrinkles.

Here's a look at the final result.

Simulating an underwater shot with a green screen For an underwater shot, you have singular directional light coming from the top-down (sunlight or moonlight) into a large void (a body of water). The light should not be spilling or bouncing anywhere, but the top-down light mustn't look like a spotlight either.

Of course, a believable underwater shot depends a lot on the behavior of the talent. However, here's how we would light it.

We placed two flags or negative fills on the sides to eliminate light spilling. Then, we set up a Gemini 1 1 Hard above the talent with a softbox or the DoP

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