Mondo Knows Facts
Rear projection put actors in front of filmed backgrounds
A projector behind the screen threw the location footage behind them For decades, actors in cars or trains were filmed in a studio with a projector behind a translucent screen showing pre-shot background plates. The camera filmed both at once. The method was cheaper than location work but gave flat, evenly lit images, and it was largely replaced by digital compositing. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Matte paintings extended sets without building themArtists painted scenery on glass and masked the live action around itHobbit scale relied on forced perspectiveSets and actors were placed at different distances to fake heightMost records are built in layersParts are recorded at different times and combined, rather than played togetherMary Poppins used a yellow screen, not greenSodium vapour lighting gave a cleaner matte than blue screensRay Harryhausen animated monsters against live platesHis Dynamation split the frame so models could sit inside live footageGollum combined an actor with digital animationAndy Serkis performed on set and again in a motion capture studio
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Tags: visual-effects, studios, technique
Rear projection put actors in front of filmed backgrounds: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A projector behind the screen threw the location footage behind them. The figure is taken from Science and Media Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.