Fun with a green screen!

This past weekend, we had more relatives at the house and after they had played their shoot'em-up game for countless hours, the kids walked around the house complaining that they were bored. It was raining outside, so I decided to set up the new Westcott green screen and have some fun with the boys.

First thing was to get on the computer to see what background image we wanted to use for the shot. We looked at a bunch of the standard images that came with the green screen software kit but ultimately decided to use one of my images from a year ago. The kids wanted to be inserted into our refrigerator, so it was time to shoot the image and shrink them down.

I positioned the kids in the center of the green screen and had them look up as if they were looking at me or the soda can. We shot numerous images to get one that we all liked. (For best results, it is good to smooth out the wrinkles in the fabric and avoid lots of shadows.)

Then we masked the kids from the background, dropped them to this image, moved and resized them to fit. (It reminds me of that old TV show, Land of the Giants. Yeah, I know, I am dating myself again. Ughhh.)

Then we went back to the green screen and shot some more images to fit different backgrounds. The kids really liked this graffiti background and it seemed to fit the teenage mentality...so...we dropped them into this one.

You do not need to have a green screen to create this effect. You can shoot images of your subjects against any solid background. A white wall would work just fine. Then you can either manually cut them out using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, or use special software for this effect, and add them to your favorite image. I guarantee you, the kids were not bored when we were doing this! It makes for a good time and a lot of laughs. Try it some time!