There’s a lot we can learn from the Queen. Celebrating her 90th birthday, we admire her devotion to duty, her constant presence and her guidance throughout the six decades of her reign.
We can also admire her sense of colour.
At her traditional birthday celebrations, the Trooping of the Colour, the Queen chose to wear lime green. She’s not the typical nonagenarian who can blend in with shades of care-home beige and hospital pink. She’s the Monarch, the Head of the Commonwealth, and when she’s on parade, people need to see her. She needs to stand out. She’s only 5’4”, but every inch of her must be visible to the crowds.
Hence the fluorescent, my-you-can’t-miss me lime-green outfit.
For the video and television industry, the colour she chose is a shade used in the dark art of CGI. Actors are often filmed in front of green screen and then the background is added. The green is a solid colour, one not normally found in ordinary dress and therefore allows anything to be projected on to it. Green screen is used from weather forecasts to James Bond films. Green screen saves on location costs, it creates worlds that can only exist in a director’s imagination and it’s a technique that can bring consistency to any corporate video shoot.
The Queen’s choice of dress resonated with the creative types out in Internet land and within minutes of Her Majesty leaving Buckingham Palace, we saw a host of CGI inspired outfits littering Facebook. Via the magic of the green screen, we saw the Queen wearing everything from space-inspired colours to Burberry prints. From leopard to the zebra stripes, the Queen had a look to suit everyone.
The speed of the reaction to her outfit does demonstrate magic and the versatility of the green screen – or chromakey, to give its official name. It’s an amazing and often underused technique in corporate video, mainly because in the past, it was a difficult procedure to get right.
Now, with modern technology, it’s easy to do. Using green screen, every interview in a corporate video, no matter where in the world, can be made to look as if it’s filmed in the same place. Every executive can be filmed in the right ‘corporate’ environment, even if they are hundreds of miles away from the office. Or alternatively, every participant can be filmed in the same location, but all made to look as if they are in a different places, saving hundreds of pounds in travel costs.
After her busy weekend, we’d like to think Her Majesty kicked off her sensible heels, settled down to watch Top Gear and check Facebook. Who knows then, she may like some of the green-screen outfits so much we’ll see her wearing them on her next official engagement.