dblan9
Member
 Hello,
I am shooting a piece where a subject is standing and telling a story. I would like to Green screen the Background and the floor. I am getting an enormous amount of green splash off the floor. I have two nice key lights trying to blow out any green bouncing up off the floor but they dont seem to be working. Has anyone been able to green screen a floor before? I would love to be able to have complete freedom with background and floor.
SpencerStewart
Member
Good question, I've lit for greenscreens before, but not with floors.
Honestly, I not sure if there's much you can do in production. Perhaps you could try aiming the lights in an angle that bounces the green as much as possible away from your subject.
In post, try to use "spill suppression" as well as you can too, to help alleviate the spill. Good luck!
Ken
Member
 dblan9,
OK, so you want the floor to be green-screened, but the subjects clothing is reflecting the green from the floor, right? Maybe the subjects clothes are too shiny. If that's the case, you could try using dulling spray on the clothing (or use duller clothing). Another possible fix is to use a polarizing filter, and rotating the filter to minimize the refections off the subject. Of course, using a polarizing filter will require using more light, since those filters absorb anywhere from 50% to 70% of the light.
Ken Hull
jburkhart
You've run into a classic green-screen problem. To pull a proper key, you have to have decent separation between the subject and the green screen, so that none of the green bounces off the screen and spills onto the subject. Usually to achieve this you just move the subject further from the wall. But it's a lot harder to move your subject further off the floor!
How Hollywood handles this is by the time consuming process of rotoscoping. But I imagine that you don't want to go frame by frame manually coloring out the green spill.
For a solution that I haven't tried myself, but should work in theory is to paint the wall green, and the floor black. You would then pull both a Chroma Key, and a Luma Key on the same footage. The black would not reflect onto the subject, so the key should be cleaner. Your subject should not be wearing black shoes for this obviously. Might be worth a shot, but again this is theory only. If you do try it, come back to tell us how it worked (or didn't).
Hope this helps,
JB
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