Production

In the production phase there are many decisions that the director will have to make, one of the biggest is whether a scene should be shot on location, or with a green screen. There are many things to take into consideration, but this step’s final answer is based on common sense. The important things to consider when deciding whether or not to use a green screen are practicality, availability, and editing.  If you are shooting an arctic voyage across mountains of snow and it’s July, then you are probably going to want to use a green screen, if you are shooting a beach scene in July, then by all means use the beach and shoot on location, notifying the proper authorities of course.  If you don’t have any stock footage of a snow storm and you only have still photos of snow, it’s not going to be a good idea to try to make the still photos your background for an entire scene, it gets boring to watch and it doesn’t look good, which brings up the point, no matter what the weather, all year long, shoot stock footage of scenery, snow, rain, leaves falling, anything you think you may want to use in the future, it helps a great deal and makes for a lot less stress when you want to film a beach scene in February. The final thing to consider when deciding to shoot on location or with a green screen is the editor, what would make it easiest for the editor.  If you don’t have much for the editor to work with, it may be time to think about either building your own set or scrapping the scene, because if a scene isn’t going to look good, there are no doubt more useful scenes that the editor can edit with his or her time.