Shooting the Green Screen Video

Dallas Video Production Company Shoots Green Screen Music Video

What is Green Screen?

You know when the weatherman shows you a map on TV?  Well, he’s not really standing in front of a map.  He’s standing in front of a blank screen.  The map is actually generated elsewhere and technology merges the two images to let the viewer see the weatherman pointing out a storm front.

Special effects companies do the same thing.  They film your favorite characters or space ships or whatever and then superimpose them onto whatever landscape they want to.  We all know something like that is going on, but that’s part of the fun.

When it comes to photography, programs like Photoshop make it pretty easy to cut out a background and insert something else, even without a green screen.  A videographer films 30 frames per second, so editing all of those frames, even for a relatively short sequence, would be prohibitively time-consuming.  Hence the use of green screens.

Why green?  Well, there is a certain shade of green that is not present in skin tone.  A video producer tells technology to ignore anything in that particular shade of green in a video and super-impose something else in it’s place.

This technique is used in pretty much every kind of video, from animated films to corporate training videos.  Most recently we used it to create a music video.

Abby Lakew – Ethiopian Singer

So, Abby Lakew lives in America, but the company which produces her music videos is in Ethiopia.  The cost of producing a music video is high enough.  Shipping the artist back and forth between the States and Ethiopia would do nothing but raise the price.  So how do they get footage of Abby singing her music to put into the videos.  They called LeniCam Video Productions.

We set up the equipment in our studio: green screen, videocamera, lights and audio.  Abby came in and we filmed all the sequences needed by her music video producers.  Through the magic of technology, we filmed Abby and got the footage to her production company faster than she could have boarded a plane at DFW and for a lot less money that the travel would have cost.

Though this is not the first music video Abby’s team produced through this method, it was their first time to use LeniCam.  They were much happier with our work than what had been sent to them in the past.  The music video we participated in hasn’t been released yet, but in the meantime, you can enjoy other work by Abby by clicking here.