Did you know Instagram Is Adding New Green Screen Tool To Its Reels Interface, Hoping To Inspire User Creativity

Instagram is testing the addition of a GreenScreen tool to the interface of its Reels feature.

This might end up being one of the more fun tools introduced to Reels. For some background, Reels is Instagram’s answer to the incredible success TikTok is enjoying. It’s a short form video creating feature, complete with it’s own separate set of tools, gizmos, and audience. What Instagram is aiming to accomplish with Reels is creating a platform within a platform that allows users popular or otherwise, to churn out creative content that captivates attention across the community, hopefully even going forward to become another trend setting giant like its competition.

For now, results seem to be tepid at best. While Reels is enjoying a significant amount of user interaction, especially in places such as India which feature a larger userbase than most, it’s currently suffering from an identity crisis of sorts. Being unable to carve a niche or image that followers and users can bank off of leads to the feature coming off as no more than a more expansive version of Stories. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, has explicitly stated as much, actively stating that Instagram has fallen short of TikTok in terms of short form content and there’s quite an amount of reassessment needed before Reels can get back on track.

Green Screen isn’t really a new feature, with versions of it existing in some form or another across TikTok and even video-conferencing apps such as Zoom. It does, however, allow for a spell of creative direction and freedom that users on Reels can greatly benefit from. Green screen technology essentially allows users to add any sort of footage, cropped or otherwise, to the background of one’s video, allowing for any number of occurrences. TikTok’s userbase has actively benefited from the low-quality application of such a feature (mobile apps can only do so much), by integrating backgrounds of a more weird nature in order to illicit a comedic reaction (adding one’s enlarged face to the background, for example).

Reels’ users may not choose to do so. They may simply use the background as a backdrop, they may use it as a prop of sorts, they may even go an entirely different direction and do something unexpected. Granted, there aren’t many options as to what the Instagram community can do with such a feature, but a door of sorts has been opened. This may be that very font of creativity that Reels is looking for, that metaphorical spark that may inspire individuality. Or it may end up being completely uninspiring. Who knows, but it’s fun to guess, no?

The feature is currently not available for all users, a fact that seems rather obvious considering how Reels itself is not available across all regions using Instagram. Testing such a feature and seeing its ultimate result is, however, a practice both commonly applied and rather necessary in this case. The addition of features such as Green Screen may be what make or break Reels.

 H/T: @himchic / MattNavarra