To further expound upon the making of my Amazon spec commercial, there was one green screen shot. I approached it with a firm hand and an empty mind. That is to say I’ve never pulled a green screen before.
Now, I have shot them in the pat. One of my earliest jobs was capturing some green screen material for the band Train (I can never listen to that song ever again) for when they appeared on The Tonight Show with Leno. My collaborators were both guys I went to school with. One now directs webisodes for Disney. The other directed MONSTER HOUSE.
Regardless, I jumped into my green screen head first. First I set a pretty specific garbage matte and then I used After Effects and Keylight to pull the green. It worked pretty well except some of the green elements in front of the screen weren’t the exact same color of green (the shooter in me knew better but the producer in me knew we didn’t have time to fix this). These elements didn’t pull like I’d hoped. There were two paths here. One, add another instance of Keylight to try and pull the second type of green or two, adjust the garbage matte so it’s more of a roto. I tried option one and everything went nuts so I hit “undo” and went with option two. Very tedious but it got the job done.
If only I had a way to practice pulling green, garbage matting and rotoscoping but I don’t shoot much of that kind of material. Wait, you can. A few days after I wrapped I found this site. They have tons of green screen examples with all the elements necessary for a fully realized comp. If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at this or if you have a comp in your future or if you just want to know the kind of Hell I went through, download any of these and see what it’s like.
Tags: After Effects, Amazon Spec, Commercials, Post-Production
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