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Halloween-Horror-Movie – working with Green- and Bluescreen
On 31st October it is time for Halloween again! And this is just the perfect occasion for celebrating a wild Halloween party.
Invite your friends and your family, make sure they all are dressing up and then present the surprise of the evening: the production of your own Halloween-Horror-Movie.

All you need is an evenly green or blue plane in front of which you can film your guests a.k.a. your actors. Later, you can place them in front of every setting you like, working with MAGIX Movie Edit pro. Audio- and picture effects will create additional tension.

This tutorial shows you, how to do that.

To inspire you, we created a special Halloween Collection with various media from Catooh.

Green- and Bluescreen – What is that?
Green- and Bluescreens are often used for movie and television productions. Even though the viewer often does not realize that, due to the mature technique.
Most of the newscasts work with that technique. The host stands at a table in front of a blue or green background (screen). This is digitally removed with a computer, where the shot of the host is then placed in front of an artificial news studio where, for example, matching pictures for the individual news appear.
Also movie often use that technique, especially for films from the Fantasy or Science-Fiction genre. The actors are filmed in front of a screen, which is removed in the postproduction (keying). Then a new background is placed behind the actors and it looks, as if they really had been in this setting instead in front of a wall in a studio.

Preparation
Although professional film makers have better equipment for working with Blue- or Greenscreens than you have at your home, you can achieve good results, if you take the following aspects into account.

Concept
Before you can start filming, you need to make several preparations. Next to the technical effort, you should think out a rough course for your film's story line. This should depend on the image material you have to place behind your actors in the post-production. Do you have scary wonderful shots of an old cementary? Or of the dark corridors of a medieval castle? What might happen there?
Prepare a note with short information on the story and its setting and hand it to your actors, before filming them. This way, they can prepare themselves for their role.

Build a screen
Now it is time to build a Blue- or Greenscreen. You need either a piece of wall, that you can paint blue or green (this can also be a movable wall) or a piece of cloth in one of the two colors that you can hang up on a wall. In any case, your screen should be matt and even/wrinkle-free to avoid reflection and casting of shadow, because they can create aberration.
You can also buy special fabrics for this purpose in specialist shops. But they are quite expensive and buying them only makes sense, when you need to use them more often. For your party, green or blue bed sheets will also do. Just hang them up next to each other on a wall and make sure, the transitions are even. Choose loud colors. Mind, that the colors are made transparent in MAGIX Movie Edit pro. Blue and green are used, because these are colors that do not naturally appear on the human body – and thus aberration is prevented. The more „unnatural“ the color of the screen, the better the result will look.



Lighting
When you are working with a screen, it is extremely important to take care of a good lighting. Therefore the background aswell as the acotrs need to be lighted, to create a strong contrast between the two of them so that the actors are silhouetted against the screen.
Make sure that the screen is evenly lighted and especially take care of the edges. If you do not own spotlights, you might as well use floodlights and position them in different directions around the screen to avoid creating shadows. You can also highlight the intensity of the screen color, by lighting the screen with either green or blue light.
Beyond that, you should light your actors with the screen's complementary color. When complementary colors cross, they cancel each other out and create white light. This way, you can prevent green or blue light falling on your actors and blurring their silhouettes. Complementary to green, you should use red or magenta light. Blue is complemented by yellow light.



Complementary colors
Also make sure, you are only lighting your actors from the sides, to avoid creating shadows on the background. This is also why they should not stand too close to the screen. This does not only increase the chance of shadows but also the chance of your actors being indirectly lightened by the screen. If that happens, the silhouette of your actors will blur in the post-production, because the indirectly lightened areas will become slightly transparent, too.

Filming
When you are filming, take care that your actors always move in front of the screen. The background should always be completely filled by your screen. A piece of white wall, that creeps into your recordings, only causes a lot of work when you have to remove it in the post-production.
Let your actors play alone and in groups and develope the story line togehter. Make various shots, to have a bigger repertory later on.
Your camera's focus should always be set on the actors, because they are the only thing left from these shots. By keeping the screen slightly out of focus, you can make small wrinkles or shadows disappear.
It is of high importance, that your actors are not wearing anything that has the same color as the screen. Wrist watches, scarves or other things with these colors should be taken off before you start filming. Unless you want to create hands or heads flying around in your film... Which can also be quite appealing, when used on purpose. Be creative!

Post-production
As soon as all shots are made, the real work begins: the post-production and the cutting of your recordings with MAGIX Movie Edit pro.

Chroma Keying
Once you decided which backgrounds you want to combine with your screen recordings, you should import them to MAGIX Movie Edit pro.



Place the recordings in two separate tracks. Make sure, that the screen recording is placed in the second track, because it will then be placed above the background image. If you did it the other way around, only the background image would be visible, when you played the movie.



Now click on the screen recording on the second image track and open „Video effects“. To remove the green or blue screen from the image, you have to use the „Mix FX“ on the bottom of the menu. Depending on the color of your screen, you have to activate „Green Box“ or „Blue Box“. You will then see the two images combined on the preview screen.



Depending on the quality of our screen recordings, the outlines of your actors might be a bit blurry or polygonal. Use the slide bars underneath „Threshold“ and „Fading Range“, to refine the image.

Sound effects
Now the only thing missing in your Horror-Movie are the right sounds. What would a moment of shock be without the respective blowoff? What would a dark forest be without an eery atmospheric sound layer? So you see that you cannot leave your movie without a matching soundtrack.
Professional film makers use a whole lot of audio tracks for their movies. That is why they come along with such a thick, tangible atmosphere that drags the viewer deeper into the world of the film. Use the many tracks that MAGIX Movie Edit pro offers you (up to 99 tracks, depending on your program version) and create a special sound for your movie. Thanks to Catooh, there are various sounds, effects and songs you can use to create the necessary atmosphere and give your images more depth.



Tip: You can find matching effect sounds in the „Sounds & FX“ category at Catooh. Atmospheric songs can be found by taking a look at the respective category or by entering keywords into our search mask (horror, tension etc.).

When you take all these things into account, your Halloween-Horror-Film and your future work with Blue- or Greenscreens will surely be a success.

We are wishing you lots of fun!

Your Catooh team