StageCraft: The End of Green Screens?
- Tomás Woods
- Mar 28, 2023
- 2 min read
Rear projections have been around for over 50 years, creating the moving background behind all driving scenes in movies you’ve probably seen before. But there is a problem: regardless of the fidelity, the digital set couldn’t coordinate itself with the camera angles, so it lacked dimensionality and made it look flat and fake. So green screens were invented, but this too became a problem for actors and artists as they had to pretend to be somewhere they were not. Today, StageCraft technology is reinventing the imaginable from “the Midnight Sky” to “The Mandalorian”, and here’s how.
Rear projections aren’t a thing of the future, they date back to the early 1930s, in Fox Film productions and were later used for “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the 1978 “Superman”. However, this far outdated technology was replaced for the first time by LED panels in the 2018 drama “The First Man” in an attempt to generate accurate lighting reflections on the astronaut’s visors. This would have otherwise been impossible if it were for projectors which don’t emit their own light. With the success of its use, StageCraft was developed as part of the VFX company “Industrial Light and Magic” founded by George Lucas in 1975. The result is a 6-meter tall, 54-meter in circumference “volume”, surrounded by huge screens on the walls and ceiling. It has become the main film location for movies such as “Obi-Wan Kenobi” and “Thor: love and thunder”.
This technology has also generated more jobs for VFX artists, while reducing the unnecessary work for color correctors. The powerhouse behind the graphics leans on “Unreal Engine”, a software provided by “Epic Games” (the company behind Fortnight), leaving new job opportunities for digital crafting artists. The big advantage of having a massive LED generated environment is that production, post-production and actors work together all in the same space and at the same time. Stage designers can now literally move mountains in seconds to create the desired atmosphere. The input can come from drone footage, environment scanners or pure CGI, all worked on and molded to create the perfect cinematic experience.
The cost? Well, it turns out that despite the screen’s price, it would also have been expensive to have filmed the set in real locations and far less practical. The first season of “The Mandalorian” for example has cost a reasonable 100 million dollars even though the LED panel alone is said to cost over 250 million.
In conclusion, with all the new advantages presented by StageCraft and other similar technologies, it seems that LED panels have come to stay. It achieves what would otherwise have been impossible to do with green screens. Going from transforming the actor’s experience to lighting and post productions effects, all blended into a volume not larger than the size of your house.
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