The AV Club currently has two greenscreen setups. The first is a permanent installation in the aptly named 'green room' at the IO West Theater. The second is a portable 8'x6' folding screen. The big screen at IO West has gone through several iterations as we have refined it to work best with our hardware chromakeyer and available space.

Properly lighting a greenscreen requires a great deal of space to cross-light the actors, preventing their shadows from being cast onto the backdrop. Given the limited space we have towork with, we've had to get rather creative.

First Generation:
The first generation was two long 4 foot wide sections of greenscreen cloth, mounted sideways on the back wall. We illuminated it with atotal of six 500 Watt halogen work lights from good old home depot. The actors were lit with a 250 Watt halogen clip-on work light and two 250 Watt Fresnel lenslights.

This worked well, but it required a lot of time to set up, andthe screen had to be put up and taken down every week to prevent it from getting dirty or damaged. To make matters worse the heat created by all the lights made working in the room unbearable.



Second Generation:
The second generation of our greenscreen involved removing the greenscreen cloth and painting the wall with green matte paint. After three coats, the wall was certainly green, but it was more yellow-green than the desired blue-green thatworks best with our keyer. This was partly due to the predominantly yellow lightgiven off by our halogen lights. To compensate for the yellow hue of the lights, we carefully placed blue gels over most of the lights. Because the halogen worklights are so focused, we also had to carefully place diffusion paper betweenthe lights and their blue gels.

We say 'carefully' because the lights were so hot that they would melt through the gels in seconds if they got too close. This added to setup time every week, and made for some very awkward gel rigging using excessive amounts of gaffe tape. This setup was very hard to light evenly, and the quality of our keys varied greatly week to week.

Third Generation:
The third and current greenscreen iterationis working very well; producing the least heat and the best keys we have hadsince we began. The halogen lights have been replaced with four 4 foot banks of cool-blue fluorescent bulbs. Two banks hang permanently from the ceiling and the other two are attached to light stands on either side of the screen. The wall is now painted with professional chroma green which is much closer to the blue end of the spectrum than the first batch of paint.

The actors are lit with two 250 Watt clip-on halogen lamps from the front left and right. Setup and breakdown can now be completed by a single person in around 10 minutes, and the green room is a much more moderate temperature. They keys that we are able to pull from this setup are very clean, and our actors can move much closer and further away from the screen without the key falling apart.

Fourth Generation: The Portable Setup
The third generation screen is still setup at IO West in the green room, but we needed a portable version of our setup so that we can take our shows to other theaters. We took two of the four fluorescent light banks and built better mounting brackets on them using clipsfrom Home Depot. The clips we used are designed to hold brooms and other toolsto a wall, they are resemble a metal spring loaded claw. Each bank now has two of these, which hold it very securely to a c-stand. Those lights are noweasier to manage than ever before, and they can be raised up to any height that the c-stands can go; previously they were not secure enough to risk raising very high.

Craig Bauer won a Fastfold screen in an auction many years ago that we have used for several events previously, so we decided to retrofit that into a portable green screen frame. Craig found and purchased a piece of chromagreen cloth off of Ebay, and sewed it to cloth designed as curtain backing (strong, opaque, light). Then he added button snaps to attach it to the Fastfold frame. Now we have a totally portable screen that can do front projection, rearprojection, and green screen, depending on which screen material is attached to it. The only downside is that it is an all metal frame, and it is not light.

The actors are lit by a pair of 500W halogen Lowell lights thatare bounced off of a white bounce cloth 'sail' that Craig constructed out of white cloth and PVC pipe. It folds flat and is very light, and the actors are now front lit with a big soft source, so shadows on the screen are a much smaller issue. The portable rig can be set up by one person in 30 minutes or less, and offers the best keys we have had to date.

Pictures of thevarious stages of our greenscreen, including build pictures from the latest iteration can be found in our gallery.