Reading - the volume

 

Green Screen

Lost in depthless green

'Better than the real world'

Virtual production studios are replacing green screens

 

Heading 1: ______________________

essentially anywhere        the next big thing    driven by gaming software    

three storeys high

This month, a new kind of film studio was unveiled in Melbourne. Called a virtual production stage, it's a type of facility that has been dubbed _______ in film and TV. The new one at Docklands is the largest in the world. Imagine a wall of LED screens ________, as long as a soccer field. This bank of screens is connected to powerful computers _________, able to create high-resolution animated backdrops that respond to the perspective of the camera. Inside this space, you can appear to be _________.

Heading 2: ______________________

painstakingly     sometimes it      their best performance in front of     Plus,    nightmare     shows up as

For years, green screens have dominated big-budget movie production.

Actors run about _______ bright green backdrops, emoting with anonymous figures in bright green bodysuits. Then later, months after this filming stage has been completed, an army of computer-generated imagery (CGI) artists _________ create a fantastical world pixel-by-pixel.

Thor played by Chris Hemsworth kissing a green screen Hulk, operated by director Taika Waititi.(Supplied: Marvel Studios)

The end results can be amazing, but the process is a _________. The lack of visual information means actors struggle to give _______, while cinematographers sometimes choose the wrong kind of lighting.

"All the actors see is green," says Noah Kander, who wrote the Virtual Production Field Guide for Epic Games book. 

"The camera people don't necessarily love it because they're lighting to something that isn't complete."

______ those green walls create their own problems. Green-tinged light _______ green reflections or "spill" on uniforms and props, which have to be removed in post-production.

"I don't know anybody who loves working on green screen because it's a compromise," Noah says.

"Sometimes it looks good and _______ looks silly."

 

Heading 3_________________

Cloze

Virtual production is ____ only a "green screen replacement", but can also be better than filming in the real world, Greig says.

On The Batman (2022), they shot a scene on top of a tower ___ sunset. Instead of having only minutes to get the shot right, a volume gave them as ______ hours as they liked.

"We got really good consistent light for 12 hours," he says.

It can also work out much cheaper.

"___ you're doing a commercial on the Moon, it's probably cheaper to do virtual production," Vu Technologies' Tim Moore says.

"But if you're doing a commercial in the park, it's probably cheaper in the park."

Partly _____ this reason, he and others in the industry predict virtual production will become the dominant filming method.