1. New Media
Technologies
At the cinema

2. To recap…
 Last week we talked about the cinema was
using New Media technologies in Production,
Distribution and Exhibition
 We looked at how the cinema used traditional
techniques to create particular kinds of
production effect, using examples from John
Carpenter’s film, “The Thing”
 Today we will be looking at how digital
technologies are used to take the place of
those traditional techniques

3. Blue Screen
 Blue Screen is a technique which allows you to combine two different
pieces of film to make them look as if they are one.
 First you film the location, say the top of a mountain, on location.
 Then, you film the actor who you want to see at the top of the mountain
against a blue screen.
 You then input both bits of film into a computer, running some editing
software, (such as Adobe Premiere) and apply a filter to the blue screen
footage – usually a red filter. This filters out all the blue background and
allows you to create a single moving image file that features the actor
on top of the mountain. This creation process is called rendering and is
a really important part of all digital movie effects.
 The problem for the film maker is that doing this kind of bluescreen work
requires a lot of memory and high processing speeds –because
effectively you are creating one big file out of two smaller files. This
involves the memory space for the two original files plus the memory
space for the effects.

4. CGI
 CGI stands for Computer generated images.
 In many films these could be animated characters ,computer
generated backgrounds or other visual effects such as
explosions.
 Ideas for CGI are usually drawn or photographed by a storyboard
or previsualisation artist and then turned into backgrounds or
characters using CAD (computer aided design) programmes.
 CGI characters have to be built up in layers in order to make
them look, talk and move realistically, so when you design a
character they have to not only have a body but also a skeleton
and a musculature which are all laid on top of each other.
 Like Bluescreen, this takes up a lot of memory and a lot of
rendering time!

5. Watching
 Watch the following three clips from Lord of
the Rings: The Two Towers
 The Foundations of Stone
 Treebeard
 The Wolves of Isengard
 What digital techniques do you think were used in
these clips and why?

6. Next Week
 Distribution and Exhibition and NMT
 DVD
 Digital Cinema
 Synergy

7. Next Week
 Distribution and Exhibition and NMT
 DVD
 Digital Cinema
 Synergy