1. Lay out trash bags as a spill guard below your roll of tile.
2. Unroll the tile so that the backing is face up and the finished, vinyl top is facing the floor.
3. Stir your gallon of paint and pour a decent amount into your paint pan
4. Evenly paint the backing of your greenscreen with one coat of paint. You’ll probably want to do this in bare feet or booties to keep dirt off the screen.
5. Allow to dry for at least four hours before moving. [Ideally, you don’t want to move this until it’s had its second coat dried, but life is not ideal. After four hours, you can roll the vinyl loosely up and tape the top flap down and let it dry standing up for another 16-20 hours or so.]
6. Approximately 20-24 hours later, paint a second coat on the screen, being very careful to be as even as possible.
7. Allow second coat to dry for another 20-24 hours.
8. After it is completely dry, wrap the greenscreen around a clean length of cardboard tubing or PVC pipe and tape edge of vinyl to the roll with packing or duct tape. Don’t try cinching bungee cords around the roll (at least not for the first fourteen days or so), or you can cause the latex paint to adhere to the vinyl flooring. [I didn’t think this part through when I made my first one of these screens. I made the mistake of not using an internal roller and securing the roll closed with bungee chords, thus I ended up creating an unrollable, vinyl-green tootsie roll out of the whole thing!]
Now you can take it wherever you need it. After it’s completely dry, it’s surpringly rugged.
[Quick Note: In order to rig up a hanging version, you can place reinforced I-rings into the sides of the greenscreen and then tie it up from rafters or other high-placed tie-down spots. Or you can use flooring staples to staple one edge of the screen to the cardboard roll or PVC pipe you roll your screen around and hang it through a suspended rod. This will give you the ability to have a window-shade greenscreen, which can be very useful.]
Hopefully this guide will be useful to you as you work on your upcoming green screening projects.
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
