P1 RESEARCH AND UNDERSTANDING GREEN SCREEN.

What is a Green Screen?

A Green Screen is something in which many people use nowadays in things from films all the way into tv programs. 

Green screens are usual placed in the background in front of things like moving objects, the reason why we do this is so that we can then be allowed to film separately to add in animated effects characters or costumes and backgrounds. 

History of the green.

The close of the 19th century with one of the world’s first prolific filmmakers – a man who spent his life studying the art of illusion – Georges Méliès. Shown in the image with the man and the impressive mustache. 

 

In his 1898 film Un Homme De Tête Méliès shows a visual trick that comes to be shown as what we nowadays think is part of green screening, the reasons for the are because well " four heads are better then one" clearly! In filmmaking, a time-consuming process called "travelling matte" was used before digital compositing was invented. This is what he used to create Un Homme De Tête.

The blue/green screen method was developed in the 1930s at RKO Radio Pictures. At RKO, Linwood Dunn used an early version of the travelling matte to create "wipes" - where there were transitions like a windshield wiper in films such as Flying Down to Rio (1993). 

One large problem to the traditional travelling matte is that the cameras shooting the images to be composted can't be easily synchronised  For decades matte shots had to be done "locked-down"so that neither the matted subject nor the background could shift. Later on computer-timed, motion-control cameras restored this problem, as both the foreground and background could be filmed with the same camera moves.


Green Screen Use from films today.

A strong example to show this would be the latest recreation of Alice in Wonderland. The reasons why I say this is because if you watch the film carefully, it's fully costumed and has a lot of animation included in a lot of it, and backgrounds that look near enough impossible. So within this the green screen usage makes the whole thing more advanced and believable to date, the
live-action sequences involving Alice in the real world that bookend the film were shot on location in Cornwall in England, all the scenes that take place in Underland itself were shot on green-screen stages at Culver City Studios in Los Angeles, with all its environs created entirely digitally in post-production.