Vitus's VFX Journey.

This was the last class for the term. The class was about guidelines for the audio-visual, so we all had to share our knowledge with an audience through an audio-visual presentation, based on our research. We have 3-5 minutes to inform the audience about our topic research. 

After all the research and finding the right resources to complete my critical report, this is how my research has come out.

For my video presentation, I took videos from youtube and edited them in DaVinci resolve.  

I liked the topic I picked because I learned a lot more about green screen and chroma key, and the origin. It started by painting a piece of black glass to create an optical illusion and now there is no movie which doesn’t use chroma key. It’s unbelievable how so easily by a click of a button we can remove a whole background or a person and more, but to get here there were so much trial and error and so much time spent on it, and we don’t even appreciate it.

This week was about how to write our research and how to refer to Harvard referencing. 

There are a few things to keep in mind while writing, so we cant use sources which don’t have credibility or it is opinions, like personal blogs, YouTube videos or films review. 

Sir also showed us the structure of the research. The word count starts from the contents page and ends at the conclusion. 

1. Title: subtitle
2. Acknowledgements (optional)
3. Abstract 
4. Keywords
5. Contents page
6. Introduction 
7. Literature review 
8. Main body of text
9. Conclusion 
10. Appendix (optional)
11. Bibliography
12. Image list (optional)

In Harvard referencing, you have to have all your reference like any quotations or paraphrases at the end of your report and if you refer to more than 40 words you should add it separately from the main body, and live 1cm of space around on each side.

Title: The origin of green screen technology.

Abstract: With just a push of a button or a click of the mouse, we can remove a background or add all new scenes to a movie with the help of the computers and camera in our modern world, it’s easy to forget that the very first motion pictures were, themselves essentially special effects. It has generally been forgotten how these special effects were created.  

Keywords: Chroma Key, Green Screens, Matte, Blue Screen, Williams Process, Norman Dawn.

Contents page: working on it

Introduction: The use of green screens in weather forecasts is well-known. In post-production, the weather map is added to the green background against which the forecaster is positioned. Movie productions that rely on separately filmed or animated background shootings are another common application for green screens. Chroma keying is a technique for changing a monochromatic background to a different one.

Literature review: working on it

Main body of text:

The background of contemporary greenscreen was the history of optical illusions. At the end of the 19th century, Georges Méliès was one of the first prolific filmmakers in history. According to Ezra, a man who devoted his life to learning the craft of illusion (2019, Georges Melies). Méliès used a visual technique that is the primitive forerunner of what we now think of as greenscreen compositing in his 1898 film Four Heads are better than one, in which he as used mattes for multiple exposures. Parrill said This was the very first matte which was used in moving pictures. (2011, European Silent Films on Video)

Méliès would use a piece of glass with black paint on it to “black out” certain scenes in his movie. This is referred to as a “matte,” and it was created to exclude all light from the film so that it would not be exposed to light. Then Méliès would stop the film, rewind it, and this time expose only the area of the frame that had been covered by the matte previously (Mullen, C.J. and Rahn, J. 2010). The double exposure was created entirely within the camera and may combine two or more distinct photos into a single frame. 

The issue with mattes is that the camera had to remain motionless at all times, and nothing could cross the matte line, the boundary between the real-time action and the matte painting. Black matting, a technique that Frank Williams first invented in 1918, “was used to shoot the couple against a blank background and then create a travelling matte to composite them against a transforming background” (Editing and Special/Visual Effects, 2016)  in the movie Sunrise, 1927. The film would then be duplicated to highly contrasted negatives until a silhouette in black and white was visible. 

The Williams Process, often known as the black back matte effect, was utilised in 1933 for the movie The Invisible Man. In order to capture the scenes in which the invisible man was stripping off his clothes, the actor had to be photographed while wearing a full black suit and posing in front of a black surface this is also known as “self-matte”. (Editing and Special/Visual Effects, 2016)  Even after more efficient procedures were introduced, this effect continued to be used because it was so memorable. There were problems with the Williams Process as well any shadows on the subject would disappear in the matte. 

Around 1925, C. Dodge Dunning created a novel alternative that employed two colours, lighting a backdrop screen with blue and the foreground subject with yellow. The Dunning Pomeroy process would support the blue and yellow light to produce a travelling matte by applying coloured filters and dyes. Dunning process was first used in King Kong (1933) on the scenes where King Kong comes through the big village gates. (Mitchell, Mitch 2004)

Many effects artists adopted the concept of utilising a blue screen to isolate an element photographically to produce colour composites as the years went by and colour film became available. “One of the early examples of the process was that developed by Lawrence Butler for Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Baghdad in 1940. The colour blue was first used for the simple reason that there is very little blue in skin tones. The blue wavelength can be isolated while still getting a fairly acceptable colour rendition for faces”. (Mark 2011)

In the past, only video systems were covered by the phrase “chroma key.” That is no longer the case. A keyer was a mathematical procedure used in early video mixers to make a variety of colours in a video signal transparent. Of course, weather map special effects are used frequently in television newsrooms all around the world.

When movies began digital post-production in the late 1990s, green began to overtake blue as the dominant screen hue. Why Green? In general, green was less expensive and easier to light than blue, registered as brighter on electronic displays, and worked well outdoors (where the blue screen might match the sky). Additionally, since digital cameras have begun to replace film cameras, many digital sensors now employ a Bayer Pattern to collect brightness, which has twice as many green photosites as blue photosites. Because of this, current digital cameras are significantly more sensitive to the green portion of the spectrum, making it slightly simpler to pull a matte from the greenscreen.

Conclusion: Special effects have been used by filmmakers to advance the medium since the beginning. The only thing that matters in filmmaking, without a doubt, is what is on the screen. It ultimately comes down to opening a window into another world, from Edwin S. Porter’s matting railway station window to the contemporary action spectacular. All of these effects we have are the only means to get there.

Bibliography:

Ezra, E. (2019). Georges Melies. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YXICEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. [Accessed 22 Nov. 2022].

Parrill, William B. (2011). European Silent Films on Video. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=2066564. [Accessed 3 Dec. 2022].

Mullen, C.J. and Rahn, J. (2010). View finding: Perspectives on New Media Curriculum in the Arts. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_F3FyK-rRTMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA31&dq=M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s+would+use+a+piece+of+glass+with+black+paint+on+it+to+%22black+out%22+certain+scenes+in+his+movie.&ots=YWsfK0Y8vU&sig=mnXABVIKT4fUduKlXYzU245-l1Q&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s&f=false. [Accessed 4 Dec. 2022].

Sawicki, Mark. (2011) Filming the Fantastic: A Guide to Visual Effects Cinematography Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=739038&query=green+screen [Accessed 3 Dec. 2022].

Editing and Special/Visual Effects, (2016) http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=4647677  [Accessed 3 Dec. 2022].

Mitchell, Mitch. (2004) Visual Effects for Film and Television, Taylor & Francis Group Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=226841. [Accessed 15 Dec. 2022].

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So I needed to work on completing my main body I have to write about the technology used now to remove the green from the other colours in our software. I exactly don’t know what is a literature review I think if I read about it I will understand it. I found out that we have access to ProQuest ebook central which was really helpful to find ebooks more easily.

This week was about literature reviews and how to get your topic to develop your research topic. So before we lock down on a subject, we should ask ourselves a few questions: What motivated you to do the research? What will the reader learn? and How might the inquiry connect with previously established research? Then we saw the structure of the Critical Report which we all had a lot of questions about. Nigel also gave us academic resourceslike Google Scholar, Jstor and Animationstudies 2.0, he also spoke about how writing introductions and conclusions which were helpful.

So I have been writing my research for a long time, but I didn’t know that I had to update it in my blog. So now I will try to update what I have done.

The topic I chose is the history of visual effects, but it was too much to cover in the research, so now I have planned to stick to only writing about green screen. I found a lot of papers about the green screen but very few about the origin of the green screen. Then I came across [digital] Visual Effects and Compositing By Jon Gress which briefly spoke about matting and I felt that was where it all began, but a lot of people say that I began with the film The Thief of Baghdad by Lawrence Butler in 1940. Now I need to find more academic resources to help to complete the paper which is hard to find.