GREEN SCREENING: A STUDENT GUIDE

Green is the colour of aliens and illness, of accidental highlights and illicit vegetables. It creeps and sprouts, and bursts feverishly across the café table when nose etiquette is forgotten. It’s a colour you skirt gardens to avoid. Yet now that you’re required to complete a green-screen project, you’ve hardly seen anything else. As you resolve to think orange thoughts, a figure lumbers into your frame, plummeting forward and recoiling back as though fighting truculent legs. He clumsily flaunts a wholly green outfit. If you believed in signs, this would probably be one.

You reluctantly begin to plot: you know that you need a screen, preferably green. You know that screen needs to be lit evenly, that the object or person in front of that screen needs to be far enough forward that they can also be lit, separately. Most crucially, you need something to eliminate the green; you need to film surroundings away from your cocoon, your troubled friends and confused, unruly hair. Yet your imaginative capacity only extends as far as the pastry between your teeth, with which you’re currently having a rather intimate, and apologetic, love affair.  Minutes later, you’re piling swirling pastries on spongy hummocks and buttercream slopes, dribbling butterscotch on foaming cloud cover and a crumbling flapjack terrain. Masculine shrieks indicate the sighting of mice nearby. You begin to regret brainstorming on an empty stomach.  

In a daunting green screen studio, you attempt to replicate the lighting that you noted at the scene of your sugar land, positioning the camera as you positioned it there. You pretend to stumble across an edible landscape, in reality, absurdly, wobbling between green walls. To finish, After Effects is your tool of torture. You must combine your performance with the cake landscape, whilst adopting technical jargon such as ‘keying’, ‘screen gain’ and ‘GoodgodwhatthehellamIdoingwithmylife’. Filled with thoughts of failure, you crawl home to devour your mini roll mountain and think on it another day. Or never again.