Preparing a Green Screen

Professional green screens can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, which is way too much for something you’re editing in iMovie. The brains behind iMovie get this, so they designed the Green Screen effect to work with some pretty common, inexpensive materials.

You can try almost any kind of green background, as long as it’s a bright, pure green color (no limes, turquoises, or pines) and isn’t too shiny (see below). To get a good idea of the right shade of green, use the color chooser you can find in most applications on your Mac, like TextEdit. (Pressing Shift-?-C usually brings it up.) Now click on the crayons tab and choose the Spring crayon. This is the color you need for your background. Fabric stores are a good bet, as are hardware stores that carry broad paint selections. Figure 6-7 shows how you can fake it.