Chroma Key: Difference between revisions

 

It can be fairly tricky to create a viable Chroma-Key effect, especially with amateur equipment -- often, it requires fiddling with hue and saturation, and even then, there is often a faint, tell-tale 'border' around the subject where the green-screen footage and the 'real' actor don't match up.

 

== Commercials ==

* The opening scenes of ''[[Groundhog Day (Film)|Groundhog Day]]'' demonstrate this - the woman is wearing a blue blouse when she steps in front of the chroma key camera, and all that can be seen are her head and hands in front of the satellite picture.

* Quite possibly the best use of chroma key occurs throughout [[Walt Disney]]'s ''[[Darby O Gill and The Little People (Disney)|Darby O Gill and The Little People]]''. Two remarkable examples are the moments where Darby plays "The Fox Chase" on a fiddle to an audience of dancing leprechauns and, most notably, the [[Nightmare Fuel|Banshee]] sequence.

* Bad chroma key is deliberately invoked in ''[[Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs]]'', when the mayor appears in front of a freeze frame of the Baby Brent Sardines commercial to promote his unveiling.

* [[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Alice in Wonderland (Film)|Alice in Wonderland]]'' used this extensively. The sets seem to consist of nothing but green walls in the proper shape, along with platforms. Only things the human characters touched actually existed on the set, and most seemed to be green and were textured via CG (The Tea Table seemed to be an exception, due to the hatter walking on and knocking stuff off). The staff comments in the "Making Of" stated it was an "Odd Mix" of Full CGI (too many to list), motion capture characters with the actor's head pasted on, normal actors human (mainly Alice), and edited normal actors (the Red Queen and her giant head).

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* [[ANT Farm]] uses this when Olive paints Chyna's bedroom wall green during a slumber party, Chyna uses [[Stock Footage]] from a movie for her background while video chatting with Lexi, to prove that her slumber party is cooler than Lexi's. Everyone in the background is at least 10 years older than Chyna and are dressed like they're in a nightclub. [[Idiot Ball|It works even when Olive puts on a hoodie the same color as the green wall]], which blanks out everything except her head until Chyna covers it up. Lexi doesn't catch on until [[Stock Footage Failure|a ninja drops in and]] [[Did Not Do the Research|attacks the people in the nightclub.]]

* E!'s ''[[The Soup]]'' (and its predecessor ''Talk Soup'') is videotaped entirely in front of a green screen. This led to a particularly memorable incident when a guest wore a pair of Italian flag briefs, which made it appear as if a portion of his pelvis was missing.

** This is also used by a number of networks instead of sets for each of their programs, to save money; instead they just leave one camera rolling and change the background. Game Network and Friendly TV spring immediately to mind.