Greenscreen Guerilla Style Lighting

Guest Post: Luis offered to share his knowledge on creation of videos and a better way to light a greenscreen. Thanks to his willingness to share his knowledge, Luis offered to write a  guest posts for my blog.

Here is a more advanced and complete tutorial on how to use proper lighting for a video for GreenScreen! ^Raúl

Following up the blog post “Basic Greenscreen Effect”, in which I commented and made some recomendations on lighting the greenscreen. Being a regular contributor at Videomaker Forums and my years of experience (using trial and error) inspired me to make some recommendations.

I’m honored to share in this post what I learned on how to light a greenscreen a la guerrilla style including a video I made.

With this video I won a YouTube competition by TubeTape.com. I won two soft boxes lights (valued around $795). This video was recorded in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and somewhere in the Sahara Desert.
Learning to light a greenscreen without a professional lighting kit can be a challenge for any videographer. You need to come up with ingenuous ideas, like using some cardboard and aluminum foil to make a reflector or anything you can find in your house that produces light.

I like to call these ingenious videographers Vidiots because sometimes we (I’m included) use things that are not supposed to be for a particular use.  In our minds if we have a lamp that produces usable light then why not use it to light our green screen set.

Who said that you can’t use aluminum foil and some cardboard to make reflectors?I have learned a couple of useful things when lighting greenscreens a la guerrilla style that I will share in this post. The single most important thing is lighting the greenscreen as evenly as possible (this applies to both professional lighting and guerrilla equipment). If you don’t do this you will get shadows on some parts of the greenscreen making the chroma keying process in post production more difficult.

Always light your green screen as evenly as possible
Now that you know what you need to do, let’s look at some guerrilla light alternatives you can use. I bought a 1200 Watts work light from the local hardware store for around $60, three clamp lights for around $8 each and three 120 W indoor flood lights for around $3 each. Since the work light generates so much light from one spot I needed a reflector, which I made with some cardboard and aluminum foil.

This light generates so much heat that I added a fan to improve the talent experience (mostly me).In the picture above you can see a more pro light mounted on a light stand, which I use as a backlight. These lights are supposed to be used to light stages so they are less than ideal for greenscreen lighting purposes and they get very hot. As a backlight it came up pretty good because the purpose of the backlight is to separate the talent from the background, in this case, separate the talent from the greenscreen. Basically you need at least 4 lights to light a greenscreen set; two for the greenscreen itself, one as the backlight and the other one to light your talent. In the pictures I’m showing in this post I use 5 lights (having two lights on the talent)

It’s better to have more lights than having a few when it comes to greenscreen. A four light setup is ideal and when you’re doing it a la guerrilla style you can light it without breaking your bank account. Two things you need to be careful with:

1. Connecting your lights and
2. Not getting burned by your lights (especially with the work lights).

Connect your lights to different plugs around your studio (or garage) and always wear gloves when working with the lights. If you light your greenscreen as evenly as possible you will get good results using any type of light. One last thing, if you have a large greenscreen and you are recording a close up shot, you really don’t need to light all of it. Just light the part your camera is capturing and use fewer lights for it.
Enjoy lighting your greenscreen a la guerrilla style.

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