Resub// Stargate Studios

Stargate studios are a production company who specialise in green screens and creating visual effects for television and movies. I thought they would be a good place to start as they have done a lot of work on some major projects, such as, Ugly Betty, Homeland & Grey's Anatomy.

Their work mainly involves using green screens to create massive back drops and background action while the actors and props in the foreground are real. The work they have done is really impressive and most of the time the keying out is done really well, but there are occasions where they have got the brightness of the footage different in each clip which makes it very noticeable that we are watching something which is edited. This irritates me as something which was real would have looked far better than a green screen mock up.

The above image is a scene from '24' which shows two people sitting on the steps of what appears to be the white house. The green screening here has been done excellently as the seams between the real footage and the green cloth are pretty much non existant. However despite the quality of the job done, would it really have been so hard to ask if a hit TV show asks to film a scene outside the white house ? Would that have been so terrible? However in this one at least they have made the effort to make the steps real, because if they had just been more green carpet, it wouldn't have made the correct sound when walking on it, and the sound from walking on stone steps would have to have been recorded and 'dubbed' , so to speak , over the sound of a shoe nestling into a green carpet. Which would have been rubbish. 

This is a scene from the tv show 'Homeland', and this is the epitome of the overuse of green screen. It sickens me that people cant even be bothered to go and film in an actual location, and its all in a studio in a controlled environment. Which makes it a lot less real. This makes me think that for my VFX sequence I need to use real footage and use green screens sparingly to avoid the film becoming an animation with actors. 

The above video is a backlot from Stargate Studios. It is is basically a show reel of all the things Stargate studios have worked on. There are many high profile TV shows in the reel which shows us how often green screens are used today and that even the most simple shots are now done with green screen.

A lot of the footage you see here is really incredible and well executed, and probably much cheaper, than doing all these things yourself, but, the goal shouldn't be to create something as cheap as possible. It should be done to make it as good as possible, and saving money can be done in other areas. This has helped me gain a better understanding of the whole green screen process, but im not convinced by all of it. 

BEFORE

This is a scene from Grey's Anatomy. This is an example of how green screen can be used to compliment whats going on and not take it over. As you can see in the foreground there are loads of people running around, stretchering patients, paramedics resuscitating people, and generally lots of stuff is going on. This would have taken ages to coordinate and plan which is the work of a skilled production team and director. The green screen is used to show a boat smoking and on fire, being put out by a patrol boat and a helicopter is flying overhead. It would have been silly to use an actual boat being destroyed due to the cost aspect, but the boat crash itself wasn't massively important to the story, the resulting injuries and fatalities are what the doctors have to deal with. So in this respect the green screen doesn't divert attention away from the story or characters. 

AFTER