> For example, did you notice that half of Titanic was shot in front of a green screen?
Okay, I guess it depends what you mean by "notice." I certainly was aware that much of Titanic was shot in front of a green screen. No matter how photorealistic special effects become, it's often fairly obvious what's real and what's not.
Movies never looked like real life, They had a butt tonne of artificial lighting. even up to the 80s outdoor scenes routinely had artificial lighting to get better exposure.
> The bigger problem is the inpainting needed to generate hidden detail when the movie is viewed from angles that are different from the one it was actually filmed from.
> They'll literally sit with a stopwatch and visualize the shots and say the lines out loud, and then adjust if it's wrong.
Thank you for these insights. This behavior strikes me as strange since the final product diverges from input. However like many things, the customs and conventions take on a life of their own in industry.
For clarity, 1 page = 1 minute, does that mean how long to read the page or how long that page is on film? I get a little confused by the part about adding descriptions, not dialog. For instance, could they not just leave trailing white space?
> historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc.
Those were often done, but other options that increased engagement were having actors do their own stunts (not always appropriate) or casting stunt workers into bigger parts.
> Less so in a scene like this intimate music concert or sports game, but probably a lot more so in dramatic storytelling and other types of more realistic films.
Presumably he has a specific type of film in mind here.
It's a little tough with films in particular because you don't really have control over how it will be depicted. Sometimes you might know that a specific shot will be an insert close of a particular panel, but in general the DP and director will shoot coverage however they want to on the day boards or no boards.
You are walking a fine line between believability and something that reads instantly and clearly for the 2 seconds it is on screen.
Films are littered with stuff that will break your suspension of disbelief, depending on your domain of expertise. Unfortunately for those of us that like movies with technology in them, we're gonna be able to pick it apart almost instantly.
I recently watched Knowing (2009) based on Ebert's review. One of the things he wrote in that review was: "The film has sensational special effects, which again I won't describe."
I found myself wondering if we watched the same movie. I thought the special effects were pretty awful. Comparing the scene the subway crash to say, the train crash in Silver Streak (1976)[1] or Speed subway crash (1994)[2], I thought Knowing[3] was inferior and just looks terribly fake to me.
There was one movie I was watching and I noticed the sound of a (propeller) plane flying overhead. I wouldn't normally have noticed this, except I was wearing headphones. I couldn't help but wonder if they noticed. and if so - did someone said - "screw this, we're not reshooting the scene."
That still assumes there is someone in the decision making chain who cares that much about it. It's important to you, and it would be annoying to me to see something like HTML being passed off as an encrypted intercept or alien transmission or something. But realistically it's almost always a brief sequence with "stuff" on a screen, and it's probably part of a scene which can (as the article mentions) be changed or canceled at a moment's notice, and you're meant to be looking at the actor(s) anyway. If it's being handled by an effects team, they're probably prioritizing other things which get more screen time.
I think this is a key line:
>The stuff that ends up looking the most legitimate, he says, is the stuff that needs to be the most legitimate.
except I would translate this as "the things which aren't meant to be noticed don't have to make sense."
My favorite example of this is the fact that in the film "Knives Out", the looming oil painting of Harlan (the murdered patriarch) was actually just a green square all throughout filming - the oil painting itself was digitally comped in during post.
Is Knives Out still a good movie? Yes. Would it have been possibly, perceptibly better if the actors had a real eyeline to work with on that painting, or the camera work was done with the cinematographer being able to see the real painting through the lens? Maybe.
Another movie one: Between the time that Tyler Durden pointed out the "cigarette burn" marks at the change-of-reel and the time that digital projection displaced film, I'd notice them _every_ time.
Okay, I guess it depends what you mean by "notice." I certainly was aware that much of Titanic was shot in front of a green screen. No matter how photorealistic special effects become, it's often fairly obvious what's real and what's not.
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