The Price of Special Effects
What do Captain Jack Sparrow, Jack Dawson, Spiderman, Harry Potter, and the Na’vi aliens all have in common? They are among the most expensive movies ever produced, and all relied heavily on special effects to help tell their story.
According to BusinessInsider.com, when adjusted for inflation, the 5 most expensive movies ever made are:
Pirates of the Caribbean – At World’s End (2007), featuring Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow at a cost of almost $342,000,000
Titanic, with Leo DeCaprio as the fated lover of Kate Winslet’s Rose, had a final budget of over $294,000,000
Spider-Man 3 (2007) had production costs close to $294,000,000
The Harry Potter series spent billions on special effects throughout its eight-movie run with The Half-Blood Prince (2009) costing over $275,000,000
Avatar cost $261,000,000
How Green Screen Special Effects Work
One of the most prevalent special effects used in these movies is the use of a green screen. Since its beginnings in the late 19th century, different versions of green screen technology – sometimes called compositing – have helped filmmakers create visuals that are virtually impossible in the physical world. According to FilmmakerIQ.com, green screen’s development started with a technique using mattes to block out areas during different exposures of the film. Next came glass shots, where a piece of painted glass was placed between the camera and the actor being filmed. Black screens, or mattes, followed, which led to “traveling” blue screens, involving filming subjects in yellow and later separating images using dyes and filters. The need for a process that worked with color film brought about a “three strip Technicolor process. The green screen process you might be familiar with started in the 1950s. The theory of how a modern green screen works is actually very simple. The background (a mono-color matte, i.e. “chroma”) is erased in a computer program like Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro and replaced with another image or video.
Green Screen Technology for Your Video
This technology is no longer just the domain of the Spielbergs and Camerons of the world. Green screen technology has also moved into the world of B2B and B2C video production. At Oswego Creative, we utilize our green screen studio to create dynamic virtual environments, transport on-screen talent to locations that are impossible or cost-prohibitive to film at and create graphics and images that can dynamically interact with talent. Our Infinity Cyclorama studio allows us to provide amazing results at a reasonable cost for our clients. To see what goes into the creation of this type of studio, we developed a time-lapse video of the new studio.
So the next time you are watching a movie and see ten-foot tall aliens or ghostly, squid-faced pirates don’t just think, “How did they do that?” Think, “How could I use that technology to better tell my story?”