Using green screen and CG elements to build any scene

Today we would like to share a breakdown of how we can achieve any effect.

Sometimes when a client wants to create a scene for a TV show, film or advertisement they can hit a wall pretty quickly. A script is not limited by anything, it can be as wildly imaginative and dangerous as it needs to be. This however, is not the case for other stages of production and is where Visual Effects (VFX) can help make the impossible, possible again.

This is how we can often help with Safety training videos, enabling us to show scenarios which are too dangerous for a stunt actor.

We have already discussed when to use green screen in an earlier blog post which can be found here, however here we will look at the use of a green screen to create a specific, dangerous or an otherwise expensive scene in a fictional background.

For this week, we will break down an actual scene from a recent video we created.

The shot we were tasked with creating involved a large outdoor scene where a SWAT team bursts onto the scene and takes the lead actor away – whilst the same actor’s doppelganger looks on!

We took at least 10 different live action shots from the green screen to build up our scene, none of this included the actual environment (which was all computer generated later on).

One simple benefit of using the green screen (which a lot of people don’t realise) is in the ability to scale the footage down. This was one of the first things we had to do as the green screen studio (although well equipped) simply was not large enough to position a camera as far away from the actor as the director wanted.

The actual green screen footage was limited by the green screen wall which was 15ft wide, we needed to put our actors into a scene over 10 times that width, taking up an entire street!