One of the greatest things about making movies is being able to create any reality you choose. With the aid of green screens and special effects, even the most impossible scenarios can be a believable part of your video. Videomaker’s Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar will teach you how to make the most of green screen and special effects illusion techniques – even with a limited budget.

In addition to valuable information, our Green Screen and Special Effects webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. Videomaker’s Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar starts at 11:00 AM (Wednesday, October 13^th), so be sure to sign up soon!

Not interested in green screen or special effects? Videomaker’s Webinar Training series provides a wide variety of webinars that cover topics including Advanced Editing, Documentary Production, Lighting for Video, Advanced Shooting, Audio for Video, and much more.

Videomaker’s Webinar Training series continues next week with an all new topic: Lighting for Video. Our live webinars are taught by our experts and feature a wide spectrum of video production and post production topics such as Green Screen and Special Effects, Advanced Editing, Advanced Shooting, and Documentary Production. Next week, Videomaker’s team is pleased to present Lighting for Video.

Great lighting begins with understanding factors such as light temperature and lamp type, as well as lighting design and set up. Videomaker’s Lighting for Video Webinar will cover lighting tools, studio lighting, outdoor lighting, light theory, fluorescents, LEDs, and will help you solve some of those difficult lighting situations.

In addition to valuable information, our Lighting for Video Webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. Next week’s Lighting for Video Webinar starts at 11:00am on Wednesday, September 8^th, so be sure to sign up soon!



For years, Videomaker has been offering training events to help our readers improve upon their video production skills. From expos to workshops, our training events have always focused on teaching quality courses in a manner that is easy to understand. In order to further assist you in the learning process, Videomaker has designed a new Webinar Training series. Our live webinar series features a wide spectrum of video production and post production topics, and will be taught by our experts. This week’s webinar is focused on Green Screen and Special Effects.

The first rule to creating green screens and special effects: If it looks real, it is real. Green screens and special effects allow you to create realistic scenes that would otherwise be impossible due to location restrictions or a tight budget. Videomaker’s Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar will teach you how to make the most of green screen and special effects illusion techniques – even on a limited budget.

In addition to valuable information, our Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. Check one out, check them all out. Our series is already in full swing, so be sure to sign up soon!

Throughout the decades, Lewis Carrol’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, has been a staple for movie and television adaptations. The most recent adaptation comes from the vivid imagination of Tim Burton.

Shot almost entirely in front of a green screen, and comprised of thousands of digital effects, the movie incorporates live action, animation and 3-D effects in hopes of pulling the audience into Alice’s world of wonder. As interesting as the final product looks, peaking behind the curtain allows us to learn techniques that can be applied to our own special effects adventures. Here are some fun facts from behind the scenes:

– Since a lot of the characters were created digitally, the crew used cardboard cut outs, full-size models, and people donned in green with eyes stuck to various parts of their bodies. This gave the actors something to react to, as well as providing a guide for eyelines.

– Hours of green screen exposure caused the cast and crew to experience green screen induced sickness and fatigue. It became such an issue that Tim Burton had a special pair of lavender tinted glasses crafted to combat the sickening effect of the green screen.

– For filming the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter) ridiculously large head, the crew used a Dalsa 4k hi-def camera. The camera’s 4,000 lines of resolution allowed Carter’s head to be enlarged in post production without losing image quality.

– The movie’s producer, Richard Zanuck, and director, Tim Burton, decided it would be best to shoot in 2D and then transfer the film to 3D. This saved them from excessive production costs and the hassle of working with 3D cameras. It was decided that, in the end, “you can’t tell the difference.”

Time will tell whether the movie will successfully capture the imagination of movie-goers. However, regardless of box office success or failure, there is always something that can be learned from our fellow movie makers. The film premieres today in London, and will hit theaters March 5, 2010.

I’ve often been asked what my opinion is on the best material to look at critically when learning about video. So I thought that I’d pose the question to all of you out there & see what you guys think? For myself, the best possible video to learn from are commercials. They are direct, tell the story in a very short amount of time and are the best example of the “shoot to edit” technique. Of course thats just my opinion, but commercials are out there to capture every type of audience. So there are many different types of ads that are done in so many different ways that it’s impossible not to find the answers to at least some of your video questions by watching them critically.  What do you guys think? What has helped you learn the most about video?