Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Pop Hopkins, owner and proprietor of Pop's one-stop prop shop. Um...
In case you don't know, props are all the stuff you see in movies and TV. Space lasers, couches, haunted dolls, forks, you name it. And here at Pop's One Stop Prop Shop, we make and sell the best movie and TV props you ever saw.
Do you need a bookshelf that opens into a secret hideaway? I can make that. How about a perfect replica of the Hope Diamond? But made out of glass. I can make that! A hair dryer and pepper grinder super glued together and painted to look like a shrink ray shooter? Oh yeah, no problem. I can make that.
And I'll tell you what, film technology has come a long way since I started in the biz. Used to be you had to make all your movie special effects yourself. You want a giant troll in your movie? You build a clay model and film it on a tiny version of the movie set. Or you get the biggest guy you can and stick him in a lot of makeup and some furry underpants. But now?
Holy schlamoly! With computers and something called a green screen, you can build whole imaginary worlds and creatures without even a single ounce of super glue or furry underpants. How do they do it? And how does a green screen work anyway? What's the big deal about a screen being green? Owen and Connor were wondering the same thing. Let's ask one of these whippersnapper whiz kid filmmakers all about it.
Green screens are used to basically add a fake background behind whatever the scene is that you're filming on set. Hi, hello, my name is Jeremy Royce. I'm a cinematographer and a professor of film production at the University of Southern California. A green screen is a big sheet of fabric that is usually hung at the back of the stage. So the way a green screen works is the camera
records the world by capturing three separate colors inside. It captures red, green, and blue. So if you're shooting and the background is all one color, in this case green,
you can remove it entirely and replace it with whatever you want to replace it with. We often try to film really spectacular moments that might not be possible in the real world. Maybe we're simulating what it's like to be in outer space, or we're trying to show a volcano exploding, but obviously we can't film at the base of a volcano or in outer space.
So we would go ahead and construct a set that looks like where it should be close to the camera, but then everything in the distance is going to be added in post-production after we've already filmed by replacing the green screen with that fake environment.
So in addition to green screen, sometimes we use blue screens and it does the same thing. The only rule we have is you can't have anything in the shot that's the same color as the background. Otherwise, it's going to disappear when you replace it. So if there's a scene with a lot of plants in it, we
We might use a blue screen instead of a green screen because the plants would disappear if we ended up using the green screen. The green screen can be removed through any sort of post-production software. Even basic editing software can do it. Professionally, people use a higher special effects software. It's called compositing. Compositing is when you remove the green and replace it with something else, creating a composite image of two images combined together. Um, uh,
Video cameras capture three different colors of light: red, green, and blue. But if you want, you can use computer software to digitally snip out anything on the screen that is one of those main colors. So, if you have big pieces of green fabric behind your actors, you can go back with your nifty software and tell the computer, "Hey, take out all the green and put in this digital picture of a dinosaur instead."
The computer does the work and boom! Those actors are being chased by a massive T-Rex! Fortunately for old Pop, green screens and computers can't do everything. People still need props. Which reminds me, I gotta go fill an order for five crates of realistic wax bananas. That's right, Pop's keeping busy. ♪
If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to send your brain on an adventure, well, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about whether you could walk all the way around the world. Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes.
Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe. If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um...
Has anyone seen my banana wax?