Red Dwarf: Back to Earth – The FX

[si]

Mike Seymour’s Twitter account mentions this:

http://www.fxguide.com/article528.html

Thought I’d share.

Topic

[Mnoooah]

‘There is one shot where Chris Rimmer is being ‘marginalized’ and we managed to add a zoom and repositioning to the shot in Post, which crept Rimmer out of shot, underlining his lack of relevance.’

where is this?

[si]

I was wondering that, too.

[p2p_productions]

Hi-res if you want ’em, guys.

[si]

Loving that second one!

[p2p_productions]

Nice one on posting the article, Si. Cheers!

[Nick R]

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…

[NoFro]

Good article though some of it went right over my head. Some nice before/after and progress shots though.

> ?There is one shot where Chris Rimmer is being ?marginalized? and we managed to add a zoom and repositioning to the shot in Post, which crept Rimmer out of shot, underlining his lack of relevance.?

I was also wondering where this is.

[pfm]

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.

[SkyAndSun]

edit

[Author]

Replies