I’ve been working with Greenscreen for over 10 years now. It’s been interesting and challenging, especially with moving camera shots. It’s been something that harkens back to one of the things that inspired me, Star Wars. Star Wars was the first film I ever saw in the cinema and that forever guided the rest of my life in every step.

I also play video games, not that often though. I love my first person shooters. I went from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom to Quake to Unreal and let it all fall aside after Call of Duty (the World War II sets).

A few months ago, I saw this demo on the latest iteration of the UNREAL ENGINE, intended to be a game creation tool so people could create video games, but this shows they had higher ambitions as well.

That is incredibly cinematic and photorealistic and done in real time, no rendering. Just staggering.

Now that I’ve been enjoying the Disney+ series THE MANDALORIAN from Star Wars, it turns out they are using exactly this technology in an even more useful way – replacing greenscreen.

Combining the real time rendering with camera match-moves and shooting this live in-camera, the industry is about to have a seismic change. Now, I could tell something was up on THE MANDALORIAN, mostly because I knew they never set foot outside of California to shoot, but also because there was something “off” in the look ever so slightly. It wasn’t greenscreen, but could not put my finger on it until I saw this video.

I think this is going to change a lot for filmmaking in the future.

 

 


Peter John Ross

A filmmaker, a dreamer, and the world's only Dan Akroyd Cosplayer