5DM031: The benefits of live action production techniques

This post will show how film making in both animation and live action film making benefit from the use of different production techniques to bring out the full understanding of the subject matter and topic they want represent in their screening outcome.

VFX & SFX
From combining these two different processes, you get the best out of the theme and scenario being presented on scene and tell any story they like. This would be by making the set up and figures placed into shot feel real with the use of practical effects especially from the props to make creatures like dinosaurs come to life, weather conditions to make their location of environment look real and with the make up like presenting man sized creatures wearing masks that look real when placed next to other actors in a scene. For the visuals, they can benefit from creating amazing and surreal worlds, environments which would be backdrops, weather effects that sometimes special effects can't do and characters, particularly when they use motion capture. All this in visuals and also special effects can gain better presentation standards on screen from constraining them together with good colour palettes, sharpened representation and contrasting textures. This is how green screens come in play as they would help with putting special effects and live action actors with surreal environments and backdrops. Which enables to blend all the techniques together and all would feel I they are showing the same theme but visual shown through multiple ways. In a way, compositing both techniques can help with the type of production values they want to make to get noticed more in film making and would help with the type of budgets they are working from. This is through what they can and can't use but also finding ways to get the best out of the alternative solutions.

Two examples of how both techniques benefit the storytelling include the walking dead and Jurassic park

 Clear behind the scenes understanding of compositing, use of blue screen and green screen visual effects of removing the legs and prosthetic make up for the actor playing the Walker. This is the same for other parts of the walkers that need to disappear to explain the situation. These make clear examples of how compositing benefits the storytelling and the production values as people would never guess straight away how these sequences were made.

This example shows the use of visual effects to create a horde of walkers which in turn helps out with the production budget of the amount of actors they would need to use as they would want to use them for close up encounters with the main cast.

 

This image shows a clear use of both mediums from the prop helicopter to the green screen creating the extra visuals of the background and extra setups and props. This in turn creates the mood of this gloomy, apocalyptic scenario and helps progress what sort of story they telling given its visuals. 

 

In Jurassic Park, these images show that they've used big animatronics and prosthetics to represent some of the dinosaurs. Their reasons for doing this would to get a perception on the creatures and make them real feel other than using visual effects all the time. And when creating realistic dinosaurs in terms of performances, the suits, particularly the raptors would be made to fit the actors in.

These images show their breakdown use of visual effects, especially creating creatures movements that the production staff wouldn't be able to do with animatronics and prophetics. The second to last image shows what I feel is their compositing with sfx and vfx, particularly with the cgi version of the T-Rex with the especially effects rain.