The Olympic tennis court is a giant green screen and the Internet has noticed
Aug 18, 2016
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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It’s always amusing when something shown on TV includes something ripe for chroma keying. This time around, it’s the Rio 2016 men’s singles tennis final between Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro.
That they were playing on a giant green screen was noticed by imgur user factionman. After this, the obvious became inevitable. I would imagine these scenarios probably weren’t going through the players’ heads at the time of the game.
Chroma keying is the process of removing a colour in your footage (usually green or blue) in order to make it transparent. This then allows you to fill in those gaps with something else. It’s a common technique with TV and video presenters to switch out backgrounds for talking heads or interviews. Green screening is also used extensively in movies for visual effects.
It’s a fairly straightforward process these days. Many editing and compositing applications have features built right in to support it. You can get started with it quite inexpensively, too.
I think the last one has to be my favourite. I can’t wait to see what they do with the Olympic swimming pools.
Have you tried green screening the tennis? What did you come up with? What other things have you seen on TV that you’ve keyed out and composited? Let us know and show us in the comments.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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3 responses to “The Olympic tennis court is a giant green screen and the Internet has noticed”
“I can’t wait to see what they do with the Olympic swimming pools.”
Ha! Brilliant!
Imagine Phelps swimming in lava? :)
So many blogs reporting on this- informing me the results are “amazing”, “hilarious”, “hysterical” and I did not laugh once, I wasn’t blown away by the creativity- all I saw was a bunch of poorly executed, chroma keys- wow! Someone keyed the Star Wars crawl zzzzzz. Look out Murray- playing on a volcanooooo zzzzzzz!
I can only imagine the people that found these ‘hilarious’ are the type that thinks ‘Friends’ is the funniest ever sitcom, still answer the phone with “Waasuuup!” And do Crazy Frog impressions