Bluescreencgi
- 1. New Media Technologies At the cinema
- 2. To recap… Last week we talked about the cinema was using New Media technologies in Production, Distribution and Exhibition We looked at how the cinema used traditional techniques to create particular kinds of production effect, using examples from John Carpenter’s film, “The Thing” Today we will be looking at how digital technologies are used to take the place of those traditional techniques
- 3. Blue Screen Blue Screen is a technique which allows you to combine two different pieces of film to make them look as if they are one. First you film the location, say the top of a mountain, on location. Then, you film the actor who you want to see at the top of the mountain against a blue screen. You then input both bits of film into a computer, running some editing software, (such as Adobe Premiere) and apply a filter to the blue screen footage – usually a red filter. This filters out all the blue background and allows you to create a single moving image file that features the actor on top of the mountain. This creation process is called rendering and is a really important part of all digital movie effects. The problem for the film maker is that doing this kind of bluescreen work requires a lot of memory and high processing speeds –because effectively you are creating one big file out of two smaller files. This involves the memory space for the two original files plus the memory space for the effects.
- 4. CGI CGI stands for Computer generated images. In many films these could be animated characters ,computer generated backgrounds or other visual effects such as explosions. Ideas for CGI are usually drawn or photographed by a storyboard or previsualisation artist and then turned into backgrounds or characters using CAD (computer aided design) programmes. CGI characters have to be built up in layers in order to make them look, talk and move realistically, so when you design a character they have to not only have a body but also a skeleton and a musculature which are all laid on top of each other. Like Bluescreen, this takes up a lot of memory and a lot of rendering time!
- 5. Watching Watch the following three clips from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The Foundations of Stone Treebeard The Wolves of Isengard What digital techniques do you think were used in these clips and why?
- 6. Next Week Distribution and Exhibition and NMT DVD Digital Cinema Synergy
- 7. Next Week Distribution and Exhibition and NMT DVD Digital Cinema Synergy