American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 92

?

Edlund

Setting

up a motion
control miniature

for

a

blue

screen

shot. Below: Rich¬
ard Edlund, ASC.

MViirragnol

byPhots
ment of how useful

"Blue screen has
had a stigma at¬
tached to it as a

the tool

for many
It seems you
always remember
process

not the

good ones.
good ones nev¬

The
er look like blue

shots," said Richard
Edlund, ASC, by way of introduction to the
screen

Back, Raiders of the
Lost Ark, Poltergeist,
Return of the Jedi,
Ghostbusters, 2010, and recently, Die Hard.
Previous Reflections (in Ameri¬

filmmaking. But only in recent years - with
the use of modern computer technology, the
continually changing science of film emul¬

Cinematographer for 1988) have been
drawn from a series of lighting seminars co¬
sponsored by Panavision and the University
of Southern California. This particular article
will address more generally the topic of
lighting for blue screen and reflects in part a
series of lectures Edlund gave in China and
Japan under the sponsorship of Eastman

sion,

Kodak.

extremely complex science of lighting for
blue

screen.

The idea of being able to insert
film image into another film image has
been around since the earliest days of
one

ever more

perfect optics and the

intangible element of experience - has blue
been accepted as one of the most

screen

important tools of effects photography.
Edlund's own career is an eloquent state¬

90

be. He

has supervised vi¬
sual effects for such
films as Star \Nars,
The Empire Strikes

years.

the bad shots and

can

American

Cinematographer

can

"There

are a

lot of

scenes

that

simply could not have happened any other
way: the Marshmallow Man walking down
broadway in Ghostbusters, or people walk¬

December 1988

ing through fire in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or
the space walk in 2010. The catch is, each of
these sequences required a different ap¬
proach to the blue screen process. There
isn't any one approach or formula that works
for every situation. Each shot has got some
quirk about it that you have to fix," Edlund
explains.
"Blue screen requires a
attention before you can actually

lot of
shoot.

Planning and sequence design are of para¬
mount importance to the success of a blue
screen shot. Careful design is important
because the background plate for a blue
screen shot may be done simultaneously
with the live action, but the blue screen
element may not be shot until after principal

photography has wrapped. So exact chore¬
ography of the

sequence and
the sequence cannot change

the actors in
without con¬
siderable expense for plate reshoots.
To forestall such problems,
Edlund explains, "We go through each shot

with the director and

a

storyboard artist.



American Cinematographer - December 1988

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 1988

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