Visual Look
The visual look of this film was very interesting. Half of it was shot in actual locations and half of it was shot with greenscreen. The footage that was shot at actual locations, was quite impressive, with rollicking views of golf courses to start out the film, moving on to fog filled nights escaping creditors, and then majestic shots of a rushing river that our heroes boat down midway through the film. (Much like in The Lord of the Rings, some of the most beautiful footage in Dork of the Rings were the shots of the heroes boating down the river.) The amount of work that went into both re-creating shots from Lord of the Rings and color-grading them to match the movies was really impressive.
Additionally, a lot of work was put into the props and the site gags to add to the film’s humor, while extra work was done to composite things like arrows and other 3D elements to make the world larger and more dangerous than life. While some of these 3D composites didn’t move very naturally, their somewhat erratic movement fit the overall comic feel of the movie and didn’t distract one from the story.
With all that said, let’s move on to the green-screen effects. As I mentioned before, a lot of thought was put into the types of props, sets, and costuming they wanted to use in this film. Additionally, they actually paid their art coordinator to work full time on the effects in the film for a year. With that much hard work put into it, there’s no doubt but that they intended the green-screen sequences to be solid elements, and not part of the campy humor of the rest of the film.
Unfortunately, the limitations of the XL-1’s DV footage they shot in combination with the chroma-keying software they either had access to or knew about conspired against them, causing the green-screened footage to have extremely noticeable issues for most of the film. The most common problems were “shearing”, in which part of an actors face or body is sheared away by the background, and “haloing”, in which a halo surrounds the actor which is made of a mix of the green-screen and partial transparency to the background. Unfortunately, these problems were evident in virtually every green-screened shot. However, because of the overall campy feel of this movie, it actually was able to get away with these green-screen problems as though they were an artistic choice, because all of the green-screen shots were so uniform in their problems. Basically, the lack of variation in the problems and the campy humor of the film allowed the suspension of disbelief that would be impossible on a more serious drama that had random green-screen issues.
However, let’s assume the filmmakers and our readers would prefer not to have these sorts of issues in future films. What went wrong to cause these problems and what can be done to avoid them in the future? While we are actually going to be doing an in-depth look at green-screening for low-budget films in the summer, we’ll cover some basic info and suggestions here.
DV footage is recorded at a 4:1:1 color space, which means that, out of every four pixels, luminance data is sampled from every pixel (4/4), but color data is sampled from only one pixel (1/4). Obviously, this makes getting a clean key very difficult, as you can have a 3 pixel shift in either direction for your matte. (This may not seem like a lot, but it actually is.)
In addition, the XL-1’s that were the primary cameras for this film are incapable of shooting in progressive mode, which means that all of the footage was recorded in NTSC’s 29.97 fps interlaced. This makes getting a clean key even harder, because rather than each frame being recorded as a continuous whole, it is instead recorded in two half frames that are a micro-second apart from each other, arranged in staggered lines from one another.
