When we watch a film, we often don’t notice the crucial element that stares us in the face for over 110minutes: The visual effects. When done properly, they should be an (ironically) invisible element that augments the cinematic experience, constructing a world so believable we are lost in it.
Backed by Universal Pictures, The Knife That Killed Me is being shot entirely on green screen at the newly refurbished Green Screen Studios outside York. Documenting the tragic story of a young boy’s spiral into knife crime, live actors are being composited into highly stylised CGI backdrops to create a truly unique cinematic identity. Vision caught up with the Visual Effects team, Andrew Manns, Ben Louden and Andrew Jones to see how.
How will shooting entirely in green screen augment the film? Does having total control over the backdrop help to set a tone and atmosphere when shooting a thriller?
AM: Shooting on a green screen allows you to put your characters in whatever environment you could dream of and, as such, lends itself well to the unique and somewhat abstract visual style of The Knife That Killed Me. From a compositional standpoint this is great as it allows a shot to be tailored to exactly the content that needs to be seen to tell the story, and after all storytelling is what movies are all about. Shooting on green does have its difficulties however, especially for actors. Acting on a green screen requires a lot of skill and imagination as you have to be aware of and potentially interact with surroundings or other actors that aren’t actually there. In all, with good direction and careful planning shooting on a green screen helps to eradicate a lot of the problems of a conventional film shoot whilst providing a blank canvas on which to create exactly the film you want to.
What’s an average day for you during production?
AJ: As the movie is shot entirely on green screen and therefore nearly all visual effects, the VFX team need to be involved massively on set.
As a team we monitor a number of elements in order to make our job of removing the green afterwards isn’t harder than it needs to be, monitoring histograms and noise levels to make sure there is sufficient separation between the subject and screen, making sure there are visibly enough tracking markers for us to recreate the camera movement in our virtual CGI environments so our backgrounds move naturally around our subject.
TKTKM has been four years in pre-production – why such a long time?
BL: The unique approach to filming this project has meant a lot of infrastructure and workflow issues have had to be completely redesigned from scratch. We’re throwing out the rulebook on traditional film-making, and in order to be sure we’ve got it absolutely right it will naturally be a very time consuming process.
In terms of the visual elements, these are still being refined as we speak. The directors really want to focus on the narrative and performance, and the feeling is they only want to use interesting visuals where it helps tell the story. There isn’t going to be anything that ‘looks cool’ just for the sake of it.
Has the world of visual technology for cinema evolved significantly in that time?
AM: Nowadays it’s not just the multimillion pound budget features that are working with visual effects. Whether its just a couple of extra buildings added to the background of one shot in a low budget Rom-Com, or an entire world filled with blue people created in a computer with a budget of $300 million.
Green/blue screen technologies have been around for years and are nothing new, and the principals behind the image processing mathematics used to replace the green/blue are largely the same. What’s unique about the way were using green screen on The Knife, is we are not looking to shoot the odd scene against green to replace an expensive location shoot, or to add super-real CGI characters. We have developed a whole new way of shooting which puts less emphasis on getting it right in camera, and allows more control in postproduction.
I understand you all graduated with masters from York Uni’s TFTV department – have your experiences here inspired and helped with the creative process?
AM: I think our time at York University will have shaped the creative process of the film more than we could know. I think a lot can be said for the kind of interaction with like-minded people that University encourages. Creativity isn’t necessarily something that can be taught, however often it can be drawn out by the right person. In all, with good direction and careful planning shooting on a green screen helps to eradicate a lot of the problems of a conventional film shoot whilst providing a blank canvas on which to create exactly the film you want to.