Introduction: Change Seasons in Your Video With Green Screen Technique

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Filming or shooting your subject in front of a green or blue screen allows you place various backgrounds behind them. You even can make a summer video in the middle of the winter or make an autumn scene in the early spring. In this lesson, I will show you how to do this with minimal resources.

Step 1: Things You Need

Green Screen Studio
Setting up this kind of studio is not as complicated as you might think. You just need a place with a wall colored in green. There are three types of chroma key background materials that you can use: fabric, painted, and paper. Unless you are a professional film maker, I would recommend the last one for a home studio as it is cheap and easy to set up on a wall. Remember that brighter is better, so go for a more neon or lime green color when choosing material. 

Also you should plan your screen lights. The key to lighting a green screen is consistency. The whole point is to create a single, consistent shade of color across the entire screen.

Video Footage
With your video background you also have a choice: You can invest your time in making your own or buy the professional, but quite expensive, footage on stock sites. I prefer making video background in DP Animation Maker. It’s easy; you get awesome results for many purposes; and it’s priced reasonably. This neat tool can be found at http://www.animationsoftware7.com/ 

Video Editor
You can use any program that supports the Chroma Key feature. I used Wax, the simple freeware video editor.

Step 2: Filming Chroma Key Video

As soon as you have everything ready, the first thing you need to do is film the foreground green screen footage. I made a short movie starring my daughter.

Step 3: Creating Video Background

The second thing is background video for your film. In DP Animation Maker, I started with an autumn photo and then added falling oak and maple leaves as well as blinking rays of light. The result was saved in AVI format with Xvid codec.

Step 4: Composing Video

Finally, we need to assemble everything. In Wax, I loaded both videos in the media folder and then dragged them into time line area. After that I dragged the Chroma Key plugin from the Video Plugins tab to the foreground video track.