In Badevil future witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is banished by her fellow Ozians because of her green skin and her magical powers. But on the set of a big-budget Hollywood studio production that relies heavily on visual effects instead of magic, she has her own enemy: green screen technology.
Vibrant green backgrounds — often called ‘chroma green’ by digital artists – are used in modern VFX processes in part because that hue is so far removed from the color range of human skin. That makes it much easier for visual effects artists to digitally select and replace anything in an image that is chroma green, taking out the actors and placing them in a new background. But if Elphaba were to stand in front of a green screen background, it would probably erase her the way her classmates would want it to, theoretically leaving an equally magical floating hat, eyes, dress, and cape to take its place the Wicked Witch of the West. .
As Pablo Helman, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, told Polygon in an earlier interview BadAfter the release of Elphaba, Elphaba’s colorization made it necessary to return to an earlier form of this type of digital replacement technology.
“It immediately became a bluescreen show,” says Helman. “When you do the preparations, you have to purchase all these screens. And so we knew we had to use a blue screen.”
Helman, whose visual effects credits range from fantastic films such as Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones to less visible work on that of Martin Scorsese The Irishman — prefers to use these screens as little as possible: “The reason I don’t like (this method) is because it changes the lighting by spreading over the entire set, one color or the other.” In his eyes, that would have sucked the life out of either of them Bad‘s most elaborate musical numbers, in which Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) leads Galinda/Glinda (Ariana Grande) and others in an upbeat song about how “Life is painless / for the mindless.”
“For example, in scenes like ‘Dancing Through Life’ in the library, it could have been a bluescreen set, because all the backgrounds were included in that,” says Helman. “But I worked with Alice Brooks, the director of photography, to say, ‘If we think we’re exposing the inside, and the outside is will bloomLet’s just light it white, and let’s deal with extracting the actors and placing backgrounds differently, because then the white light will help us get the true meaning of what it means to be in such a set .’”
The contrast between the bright white light that Brooks and Helman wanted for that scene and the blue light that digital-friendly backgrounds would have spread across the sequence is part of the frustration Helman often sees on film sets, where different needs for a shot can arise . conflict.
“If you go to the beginning of green or blue screen photography historically, it’s because in visual effects we like to separate everything and we like to have control over everything,” he says. “But the director also wants to have control, and the production designer wants to have control.”
Despite all the preparation Helman, director Jon M. Chu (Crazy rich Asians, In the Heights), and the rest of the filmmaking team involved in the project, it wasn’t until they were on set that they discovered that avoiding an Elphaba clash on the green screen meant running into another problem.
“Until we started shooting in Shiz (the University of Oz), we (didn’t) realize that everyone was wearing blue,” Helman laughed.