Chroma Keying

Hollywood's go-to trick to faking it: chroma keying. The most common form of chroma keying nowadays is the green screen. But this technique dates back to 1940 in Larry Butler's film "The Thief of Baghdad." The same technique hasn't changed much since, and has been a film production staple in all genres.

A green screen is literally just a big cloth in the background in a crazy, unnatural green color. The reason that it's such a crazy green is that neon green is a color does not naturally occur, there for anything else will stand out when it's in front of it. Nowadays, in a video editing program, you can take that footage and select all of the green in the background and delete it. This process is called keying it out. Once it's all gone, you can place an image or video behind that footage to make it look like the subject is in a different setting.


This technique is used during post-production to take a subject from a huge green set to fantasy settings that are impossible to create. This continues to be used today as it the simplest, and cheapest form of set design.