If you think back to some of your favorite television shows or movies, chances are that some of them used green screen a few times throughout their production. It is an inexpensive way of supporting storylines that place characters in locations that are too expensive to visit or situations that are too dangerous or fantastic to recreate in real life.
When we refer to green screen, we are really talking about a process of removing the background from a shot using chromakey. But, most people will refer to the background they stand behind–green–and not the actual technical name. In actuality, any color could be used. Green and sometimes blue are chosen because they are the most contrasted against a person’s skin and makes it easy to cleanly remove the background behind them.
It is fortunate that nowadays that home computers and cheap software have made it easy to create many of these effects at home for the smallest productions.
Puppetry and Chromakey
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use special effects to enhance your puppet video. If you have a set available, you might use a green screen background to extend it either by portraying a world outside a window, or maybe creating an illusion that your set is a part of a much bigger environment.
Or, perhaps you want to show that your puppet is standing in a location that is too difficult to reach, or doing something that they normally can’t do, like driving a car or flying in the air.
Every effect shot begins with a performance in front of a green screen. You would approach your performance in the same way you would if it wasn’t in front of a green screen, although you also want to think about how you want the final shot to appear. If the audience needs to see your puppet down to the knees, then you want to position them a little higher so that their knees are visible. There’s no harm in showing more of your puppet than what’s needed, because you can make adjustments later.
You also want to think about ways in which your puppet will interact with his or her environment. Perhaps there are objects that they will refer to during the scene that the audience needs to see. In my video “The Powerhouse Museum,” characters referred to an object that became important later on which they referred to as a haunted object. I positioned the box in the foreground of the shot so that the audience would know what the characters were talking about.
You can also use chromakey effects to create or alter a background. For example, you might start out with the backdrop of a living room. If you color the windows with green, then you can replace the green with a shot of the outdoors, giving a sense of where the house is located in the greater world.
In my video “Space Miners,” I created the location that I wanted by layering in different elements. I found a cockpit background that would work as the cockpit for the ships that the characters were piloting, and layered in a shot of a rocky terrain to create the illusion that they had landed on an asteroid. I used the same exterior shot in a scene where another character was walking across the surface of the asteroid. This helped to maintain continuity between the scenes.
In my video “Wyatt meets Tom Servo,” I again used backgrounds which established that Wyatt was on a ship, but during scenes where he communicated with other characters long distance, I framed some of the shots so that they would appear to be playing on a viewscreen. The background for Tom Servo needed to be from the show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” to create the illusion that he was speaking from the bridge of the Satellite of Love.
I also layered elements for my “Twas the Night Before Christmas” video. This allowed me to create a shot of Wyatt sitting in a chair inside a living room. I also layered in elements to show Santa Claus driving his sleigh. I depicted motion by applying a zoom-out effect to the background behind him.
If you are shooting a conversation between two puppets, you want to set up your shots so that the audience understands that they are in the same room together, and where they are in the space. If you are performing with another puppeteer, you might shoot scenes where the puppets are talking with each other, and then closeups of a puppet responding to or reacting to what the other puppet is saying. What I do is switch the background between the two different characters. Imagine two people who are standing in a library, perhaps there is a window behind one character, but the other character is standing in front of a shelf with books. These would be the backgrounds behind each character.
In my video “Back to the Matrix,” a lot of the dialogue takes place inside a post-apocalyptic world. I maintained this illusion by enlarging and shifting one background so it would appear that the characters are surrounded by rubble.
If you are performing the puppets by yourself, you can also blend them together into the same shot. To do this, you would record the performances separately, and then during editing you would drop both sets of footage into the same scene and synchronize them so that they are talking or responding at the right time. You can then cut to close ups of a puppet reacting or responding to maintain the scene’s flow.
Once you have your footage, your next step will be to combine the shots of your puppet with the backgrounds, foregrounds, and effects that pull everything together. By applying chromakey, you can then adjust the size or position of your puppet so that it fits better in the frame.
These special effects tips only scratch the surface of what is possible with green screen and chromakey. Had I taken a little more time, I could have shrunken shots of my puppets so that they appeared small next to the towering rubble and used that as an establishing shot. Or, combined shots of them talking to each other.