Red Dwarf: Back to Earth – The FX

It’s great to see Red Dwarf getting an article as in-depth as that. It’s not far off the length of the VFX articles I recently read about Watchmen!

The fact you can’t tell which shot(s) they zoomed-in to crop out Chris just shows how ridiculously high-res those cameras are.

After watching the Making Of, I had a thought about what they might do for special effects if new Red Dwarf episodes are filmed in front of a live audience. Some of the virtual set scenes in Back to Earth (such as the Rimmer/Katerina corridor scene in part 1) were still focused on dialogue rather than action, and only only done green-screen because the budget wouldn’t allow for a full-size corridor set.

If those budget restrictions continued into a new series, they might need many more virtual sets. From the comments in the Making Of, it sounds like green-screen setups don’t have to be as time-consuming as they used to be, and they don’t require as controlled an environment.

My point is: would it be feasible to set up a small green-screen stage in view of the audience, right next to the the bunk-room set and anything else they construct for real? That way, you’d retain the performer-audience interaction (as VII proved, laugh tracks benefit from being captured live), while still allowing the final shot to have all the the grandeur of a CGI set.

No doubt someone’ll point out that it’s already common practice for live audience sets to include green screen elements…

Even if the audience were back we would still be looking at 60% pre-record, at least IMO. They could still keep the four-walled bunkroom though, just like on Alan Partridge where all the sets were enclosed but there was still a live audience.