The origins of Greenscreens

Green screen or chroma key is a special effect that filmakers and newscasts use to create a false reality.

The first green screen actually wasn’t green. It was black. George Melies introduced this special effect in his film Four heads better than one. The matte technique created by Melies consisted of layering multiple frames that added or removed certain parts in the film.

Larry Butler introduced the blue screen in 1940s. He incorporated this effect in a movie The Thief of Baghdad and won the Special Effects award at the Oscars. It wasn’t until 1960s when technology advanced enough to use the blue screen on a higher level.

The next stage followed in yellow. Disney Channel was known to heavily use this method in its films. Mary Poppins is one of the famous movies that used it. The process used the sodium vapor for technicolor film production. It used specific light wavelength as a backdrop, to pick out certain colors.

When Chroma Keying or layering of images, came into play it was used in almost every film production from then on. Filmmakers realized that different colors brought different results and green gave the best one.

This is when the Green screen actually came in. It was first used in a newsroom to give weather reports on British and American TV in 1970s.

It was later in 1980s that the method was perfected by Richard Edlund in the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back. He created a quad-optical-printer that layered shots from multiple reels much faster and cheaper.

Michael Jackson would be known to be at the forefront of presenting music in new formats and styles. In 1979 his music video Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough came out, and it used Chroma Keying.

Tony Merzetti, executive director at New Brunswick Filmmaker’s Co-op, said he was most proud of his recent work with Cat LeBlanc for the music video Side of the Road.

“It looked really cool, it looked like she was on some weird type of vessel. It was really easy this time around to get the green screen to work. We had lots of light, it was evenly lit so it was easy getting the separation afterwards,” He added.

This time it didn’t take long for him in postproduction process because the shoot was during the day and good lighting is one of the most important aspects in Green screen production. With the advancing technology in cinematography it has become much easier to create alternate realities, but it also became harder to impress the audience with classic special effects.

Almost every music video, movie or newscast uses a green or a blue screen, be it Star Wars, the CBC weather forecasts, or Katy Perry’s music video.