Green Screen vs. Rear Projection

The Adventures of Paul and Marian takes place in the big city, in the jungle, on mountaintops, in boardrooms, and even (briefly) adrift in the universe.  The feel will be highly stylized; thoughts and images in the heads of the characters will appear behind them during certain moments of the movie.

Our plan was to achieve this effect using green screen.  We’d create a real physical set and place a green screen behind the actors so that we could cut them (and the set) out and place everything in any number of environments.  This is an inexpensive way to give us virtually any location we want.

The style I had in mind would be reminiscent of the rear projection you see in old movies.   We’d want it to be clear that the background is stylized and not trying to pass as “real.”  It needs to appear as an artistic choice, not a budgetary constraint.

But the more we thought of it, the more it made sense to us to shoot this movie not in front of a green screen, but to actually film it in front of rear projection.  This way we’d be able to get the movie shot at one time, rather than creating the images in post production.  Also, the actors, lighting technicians, and set designers would be able to actually see what the camera sees, lending to more grounded performances, and a more consistent design.

There are some downsides to using rear projection rather than green screen though.  We’ll need a much larger space and a very large screen to project on.  And we won’t have freedom to make changes once we shoot the movie.  But after a long discussion, the director of photography (Alan Smith) and producer (Eric Berkal) and I decided to go with rear projection.  I’m old school enough to want to get everything done in camera, and we think it will be easier to make the movie look its best this way.  Alan has shot both green screen and rear projection before so he was able to help us decide with confidence.

On the plus side — if we’re unable to find or afford a large enough space, we could still achieve this affect with green screen.  So for now, that’s our plan B.

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Tags: green screen, hard decisions directors have to make, rear projection