Visual Effects for Film and Television

6 Combined action with pre-shot backgrounds

The problem with techniques such as glass painting or matte shots is that they do not permit the foreground action to overlap the background. In the real world everything overlaps and for believability it should do so in VFX too. Fully integrating actors in synthesized scenes is one of visual effect’s main tasks and the principal techniques for achieving it are so common that they tend to be used for all composite shots, even where a more basic system might do just as well. The simplest methods require that the background is pre-shot so that it can be placed behind the live action element as that is photographed. This is a disadvantage both organizationally and creatively because it requires pre-visualizing ...