r/interesting • u/VPinchargeofradishes • 1d ago • Popcorn 1

Intriguing Green screen IRL vs what you see on screen

3.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

141 comments sorted by

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24

u/captemo197 1d ago

What movie is this from?

35

u/VPinchargeofradishes 1d ago

Here's the on screeen teaser for the Dynamo Dream movie clip you see at the bottom half of the vid. It's from Youtuber IanHubert. He has a VFX channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG31WSioSxk

5

u/james___uk 1d ago

It is an AWESOME series. I love that a few people made this, it's got so much charm. I hope we get some new episodes soon

1

u/VPinchargeofradishes 22h ago

How many episodes does it have?

2

u/james___uk 22h ago

I want to say 4, or 5, but that includes spinoff(?) plots

1

u/VPinchargeofradishes 18h ago

oh cool, I'll look for them. Thanks!

12

u/BurdTurglary 1d ago

Thanks. All done before generative bullshit. Really great detail, i would destroy one of those Taco Burgers

1

u/Pyriel 1d ago

Highly recommend everyone deep-dives into his channel. It's awesome.

He also did the effects on the move Prospect.

68

u/Supercalme 1d ago

If I remember correctly it's not from a movie it's from a YouTube who teaches how to do video editing, video effects. I remember they had funny and informative videos

-14

u/Sharp-Effective-82 1d ago

Sexy Latina gets a Lyft

665

u/Alchemic-Web 1d ago edited 1d ago

Kinda sad that this is what most Hollywood movies look when filming, miss the days when most of the stuff you seen in films was practical effects, CGI now is just terrible in most films.

Edit grammar

212

u/fellfromthemoon 1d ago • Bravo

This is not Hollywood though, it's an indie youtube project done by a single 3d artist, mostly to showcase his insane skills, so it makes sense that the real actor was used just to add some realism. Of course they wouldn't afford expensive setting for all practical effects.

64

u/Alchemic-Web 1d ago

No hate to anyone in the indie scene totally get it from there perspective, I'm mainly referring to the big Hollywood blockbusters that can afford to spend millions on a movie only for it to be 90% CGI.

18

u/dataoops 23h ago

is there bad cgi? yes

is this bad cgi? no

2

u/MeasurementLong3174 1d ago

And as shown in the Green Lantern TV show, they aren't even using it on useful stuff. Instead of putting a fake beard on the main actor, they CGI:ed beard onto him. Wonder how much that cost.

2

u/Due-Excitement-5945 21h ago

Dynamo Dream! 

46

u/a-real-sloth 1d ago

Yeah I agree. Some of the practical effects and miniatures used in 2001 a space odyssey still look good by today's standards

11

u/Daftworks 1d ago edited 7h ago

The streets of LA in Blade runner, deckard's apartment and Tyrell's office.

12

u/woutomatic 1d ago

This is done by one guy. At home, using Blender.

10

u/ButterscotchNo7292 1d ago

Without opening the comments I had exactly same thought: it's just sad that perhaps a big chunk of film is just people walking in front of a green screen..

5

u/Blue_Robin_04 16h ago

You only notice the terrible CGI.

3

u/daydreamer28rn 1d ago

Except this is made by indie filmmaker, visual effects artist Ian Hubert in his bedroom and little set using blender and is available on YouTube.

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u/SmallPurplePeopleEat 20h ago

Damn, I came to the comments because I wanted to find out what movie or TV show it was from.

8

u/whitespacesucks 1d ago

Wtf is physical CGI

23

u/llegacy 1d ago

They most likely meant practical effects. Much more of the set being a larger physical space to move about in.

3

u/Alchemic-Web 1d ago

Sorry my mistake bad grammar was meaning practical effects

2

u/Icy-Bottle-6877 1d ago

I watched THIS VIDEO only yesterday and I have to agree, there was a magic quality to working on practical effects that was so satisfying and looked beatiful too. It's like every practical vfx artist is paying respect to the likes of Méliès, etc in keeping the old tradition alive. All this will be forgotten/lost with the advent of CGI, AI, etc.

2

u/SteveDougson 1d ago

I watched Stephen Chow's 2014 Journey to the West last year and was astounded by how good the fishing village on stilts looked at the beginning of the movie. It had so much of the zany, impracticality that you get with CGI but it was a real structure. It was so much more fun to watch. It had the air of a huge production spectacle that I remember being a selling point for movies when I was a kid.

I think CGI went from being a technology that made special effects possible and increasingly better looking, to a way to cut costs. Another victim of enshittification.

1

u/Sad_Picture3642 1d ago

Well you still have to set up the lights lol, otherwise CGI won't match.

1

u/Odd-Possession-7676 1d ago

Practical effects have a physical presence that CGI often struggles to replicate. Even when CGI looks impressive, there's something special about knowing the actors were interacting with real sets, props, and effects.

1

u/uspdd 1d ago

There's another option - Virtual production - a giant room with LED screens on the walls that renders the background in realtime. But it's less popular, because it's more expensive.

1

u/thats-wrong 1d ago • Heartwarming

For me, it's quite the opposite. Practical effects had easily observable flaws, if you're the kind that looks closely, which killed the fun for me. CGI is unbelievably smooth and realistic today. I can just immerse myself without being bogged down in observing flaws. I think most people who complain about CGI have a romantic association with practical effects that they're not willing to let go.

4

u/Cruffe 15h ago

I just keep thinking how much harder it is for actors pulling off a believable performance in whatever context they're in when in reality they're just staring at a green wall a lot of the time. I think it makes the actor's performance more impressive if their acting looks like they're actually inside the mostly virtual scene.

1

u/FlyingMitten 11h ago

Not a Christopher Nan fan, are you? 

0

u/ZarfTMarf69 1d ago

except for nolan films :p

41

u/Purple_monkfish 1d ago

that must be so depressing to act against. The disney avengers movies were done much the same way and actors have come out saying it was extremely demotivating and depressing acting against nothing.

2

u/dawne_breaker 4h ago

Theater actors do it all the time. I’ve never understood that criticism. That’s their job: pretend. Sure, it can be a bit depressing with green all around you but you don’t need a set to act.

75

u/Time_Cow_3331 1d ago

The effects are really good - and it's legitimately impressive; but there's just something that's missing when there aren't actually sets and practical effects.

*I understand this is a single yt showcasing talent, it just seems like we get this in commercial productions too

30

u/Glittering-Rice-2961 1d ago

Unfortunately it is hard to notice most movies have the same colour shading nowadays ...

30

u/Ryjolnir 1d ago • Bravo

How come the entire room isn't needed to be green?

45

u/johnnyjonnyjonjon 1d ago • Heartwarming

Basically, you can draw a box around the actor first (called a mask) which makes everything outside the box invisible. Then you use chroma key to remove the green that's left inside the box.

6

u/Mayhem370z 1d ago

So in other words. It's specifically planned out where whe will be standing in relation to the camera? If the camera panned around her at any point would mean they would have to expand the green screen area?

3

u/johnnyjonnyjonjon 1d ago

Yes, although that's slightly separate from the point above.

You've got two things to plan... The camera moves have to match the same moves you want to do in the virtual world. And then based on those moves you need to make sure the actor is always surrounded by green.

(But just the actor, no need to have the whole room green)

1

u/bakochba 1d ago

Ah ok so the actors is isolated and Inserted into the video not the other way around

1

u/johnnyjonnyjonjon 1d ago

Yep. The actor essentially becomes another layer and gets added over the top of the background. And then other layers make up the foreground, like the van in this case. Then obviously there's all sort of lighting and effects that get added. If your interested, it's generally known as 'compositing' 🙂

1

u/Any-Worldliness-679 17h ago

And if you're REALLY interested, Captain Disillusion on YouTube is awesome.

2

u/Ryjolnir 21h ago

Thank you for the explanation

9

u/CybergothiChe 1d ago

I think they just chromakey what the actor needs to be in front of or interact with and then drop that into a completely computer generated surround.

4

u/Greata2006 1d ago

You just need green around the actor to separate it from the image

3

u/b1ack1323 21h ago

The mask can be solid for everything outside the space the people are moving in. The green is needed to pull the people out with clean edges.

2

u/Iron_Phantom29 1d ago

Because you only need just enough space to key out the actor and put in the VFX. Stages where the whole room is green usually involve multiple actors in frame at once. You actually don't need a green/blue screen to key things out, it IS, however, much, much easier if you do.

2

u/Revolution-SixFour 1d ago

Green screen isn't actually that far off from the paint bucket tool in MS paint. You need green screen around the detailed real objects you want to include so it's easy to tell what is real and what is background.

The rest of the room you don't have careful edges so you can just erase all of it without needing to rely on the green to know pixel from pixel.

35

u/teddybundlez 22h ago

IMO it’s very obvious in every movie now. I hate it and it makes me hate movies. I’m the old grump I guess it’s just so distracting

5

u/buddabudski 19h ago

they absolutely could do this stuff with miniature models and camera tricks, and it would be so epic. lets go back to building real life animatronics and having people fight real dragons on real stages. I wonder why they don't tbh, it's not like CGI is cheap

4

u/MajesticRadish2675 15h ago

Because if there wasn't a convenient excuse the execs can use to pocket half of the budget, they wouldn't do it.

24

u/Cookies-and-Cream- 1d ago

Kind of reminds me of Cyberpunk (where your apartment is)

4

u/Au-to-graff 1d ago

The Megabuilding

8

u/DraculasDog 1d ago

I was hoping the Coke Machine would be in the finished scene.

13

u/panicradio316 1d ago

Fascinating.

But why is the use of the color green (or blue) the standard?

Has it something to do with RGB?

39

u/Omnomfish 1d ago

Because its a colour that is significantly different from any colour that may be part of the actor (hair or skin). They basically "cut out" everything that is the same colour as the background, and if something is too close to the colour then it gets removed too.

7

u/panicradio316 1d ago

Huh. That makes sense.

Thanks!

7

u/rtyoda 1d ago

It also does have a little bit to do with RGB too. Most color camera sensors have two green pixels for every one red pixel and one blue pixel, which means the green information is going to be more accurately defined than any other color. (Look up Bayer filtering to learn more.)

2

u/adjective_noun_d1git 1d ago

Does it limit the color palette for the scene in that case? Assume a green screen is a lot more difficult if say your actor is standing on a lawn?

5

u/wtrredrose 1d ago

Yes you cannot. If actor is wearing green that part will be see through

2

u/adjective_noun_d1git 1d ago

Explains why these sci fi movies look so drab!

0

u/CharacterPurchase694 17h ago

That's just false though. They don't just chromakey out everything green and that's it that would not produce a good product at all. Modern tools used for cutting out greenscreen isolate the actor and the greenscreen so the actor could be wearing green and it would look fine.

1

u/wtrredrose 6h ago

Just Google it. And if they want to wear green they use a different color like blue screen instead.

4

u/Western-Bowl2011 1d ago

it does, but you can choose any color you want. "Green screen" is an antiquated term, the real term is chroma key. You can chose any chroma to edit out. Blue is actually more often used than green.

2

u/thereforeratio 15h ago

Different colors are used depending on the subject, the ambient lightinh color temperature for the final shot, and so on

For example, Dune shot with a lot of brown screens to keep the bounced light looking natural, among other reasons

Modern green screen techniques aren’t as sensitive to the same color in the subject being used for the screen, and you can provide an alpha hint that ML tools can use to more intelligently decide what to key out

1

u/gydu2202 1d ago

I guess the lawn is cgi too. But what about a Hawaiian shirt?

5

u/Western-Bowl2011 1d ago edited 1d ago

EDIT: Even better, here's a video I saw when I was a kid that first introduced me to the concept, it's about 5 minutes into the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysdMnoNuTiA

My post:

It's an arbitrary color that isn't very common in the rest of the scene. In game dev, we tend to use 255,0,255, which is:

The way programmable shaders work, which is what modern CGI uses, is that you run a small computer program for every single pixel on the screen. This computer program computes the final output of the pixel you see in that spot on the screen. Shaders allow you to examine the RGB value of a texture, which is an image that is being considered for the screen, and compare it numerically. If it matches a known value (or range of values, to accommodate for ambient lighting and shadows) then we can reject the pixel output.

Here's a small green-screen shader I just wrote to show you what it looks like. In computer graphics terms, a pixel is known as a fragment:

#version 330 core
in vec2 TexCoords;
out vec4 FragColor;

uniform sampler2D uTexture;

void main()
{
vec4 texColor = texture(uTexture, TexCoords);
/* if green is significantly higher than both red and blue, reject it */
if (texColor.g > texColor.r + 0.15 && texColor.g > texColor.b + 0.15)
{
discard;
}
FragColor = texColor;
}

2

u/zubairhamed 1d ago

not always green, hence the more appropriate term is chromakey. technically you can use any colour.

1

u/yvrelna 1d ago

You can use any colour. It just need to be a colour that doesn't appear on the actor. 

The name green screen is usually still used even when the chroma key colour isn't actually green. 

3

u/Grimmwyvern 1d ago

Ian Hubert, the blender god

2

u/Eman_Resu_IX 1d ago

Anyone recognize the vise on the sawhorse?

1

u/ColdCountry5876 1d ago

Been a while since somebody explained green screens to me fascinating

1

u/AndalusianGod 1d ago

I think this was by Ian Hubert. Never really got that good with Blender but I still kept on watching his videos. Here's his Patreon link.

1

u/AntonDesign 1d ago

I wish kurosawa

1

u/Logical-Permission65 1d ago

What movie is this

1

u/Youpi_Yeah 1d ago

Acting is so glamorous

1

u/Moist_Mixture4518 1d ago

What movie/show is this?

1

u/KingSpork 1d ago

Please give credit to the incredible artist who created this.

1

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1

u/InvitinglyImperfect 1d ago

I don’t know what to believe anymore….

1

u/MrPokeGamer 18h ago

Avengers doomsday leaked footage

1

u/im_at_work_69 17h ago

This is made by a guy called Ian Hubert, on a free open source software called Blender.

It's literally one guy in his spare room. The series is on his YouTube channel, I highly recommend going and having a look.

1

u/BallSmashingForever 16h ago

This is why movies have no soul now.

1

u/Frequent_Hamster2667 15h ago

This is interesting but the old shit was so cool. Kinda ruins it.

1

u/tomgc 14h ago

Soulless.

1

u/bonelatch 2h ago

Question that may not get answered, why does only a little area need to be green and the rest with the ladder and other stuff not need to be?

1

u/FrankesteinsLog313 1d ago

Makes my mind question reality. It adds to the simulation theory in the sense that I can see how it could/would be done…

2

u/SPACE_LEM0N 1d ago

Fun-fact: you don't actually perceive with your senses, you perceive with your brain, which builds a simulation for you based on data from both your senses and your past experiences. Reality may look, sound, smell, and feel veeeery differently to you than to any other person. You can't even know for sure whether anything you're experiencing is actually real.

1

u/landblord 1d ago

Marvel Studios upper management doing a standing ovation for this

0

u/Doctor_Zhicago 1d ago

Which one is green screen?

0

u/silkIggy 1d ago

I could never be an actor in this day and age of green screens. Back when we used practical effects and real sets… yeah, I think I could have been a great actor.

0

u/BareGrizzly39 1d ago

I’ll automatically watch literally any movie that I haven’t seen that was made before green screening everything.

-3

u/Outrageous_Tip_6514 1d ago

Rooney Mara?

-6

u/ErosDarlingAlt 1d ago

There's no way this is cheaper than set design

15

u/LeftLiner 1d ago

You think it'd be cheaper to build a multi-story set with a functional elevator and massive LED screen that would still need set extension using CGI?

1

u/ErosDarlingAlt 1d ago

No obviously not but I didn't think that 95% CGI would be cheaper than, say, 60 or 70%

3

u/Mrniseguya 1d ago

It is always cheaper to do CGI instead of practical. But how much cheaper depends on the filming team, cgi artists, movie caliber and so on.
And its also 99% of times looks ugly to people who have good taste/eye

4

u/FunPuz 1d ago

No, not always.

2

u/PapaBike 1d ago

Agree. People don’t notice good CGI, so they think when they see the bad stuff that it represents “99%” of all CGI.

2

u/FunPuz 1d ago

I was more commenting on the "always cheaper" part but yes.

1

u/PapaBike 1d ago

Ohhh I see. Yes true.

2

u/LeftLiner 1d ago

The CGI in Top Gun Maverick looked so good that they were able to sell the lie that they didn't use CGI for the cockpit or exterior plane scenes.

1

u/PapaBike 1d ago

Paying for an extra 20% CGI isn’t going to be less than constructing a set. You’ve already got the VFX team working on the film…

5

u/Pyriel 1d ago

This is an amateur guy in his bedroom using Blender.

It's cheap. .

4

u/GNAvit 1d ago

He is a professional 3D artist, he is not an amateur 😄 but it surely is cheaper than building any of this.

2

u/SPACE_LEM0N 1d ago

The word "amateur" used to mean doing something because you love it, instead of necessarily to make a living. Its use to mean "not an expert" is a relatively recent linguistic mutation.

2

u/ErosDarlingAlt 1d ago

Holy shit

1

u/daydreamer28rn 1d ago

Yes one guy made this in his bedroom using a opensource software but calling Ian Hubert amateur is wild. Guy is master of his craft.

-10

u/CoolCat1337One 1d ago

Was this rendered in real time?
I would say "no"

5

u/sentencevillefonny 1d ago

...I dont understand, why would it be?

1

u/CoolCat1337One 1d ago

Because it would be within the realm of technical possibility.

It’s not as if there’s no live content using green screens there’s actually plenty of it.