And now let’s go even more complicated - what about shots which include optical effects and/or composites? Since this is a Star Wars site, let’s say a Star Wars example - the shot where our heroes look through the window on the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon and see the flying fighter and the Death Star. I remember that this specific scene was explained in some of the documentaries, not sure which one, but from what I remember they combined them using the optical printer, in other words magic. But what did go inside the optical printer? The original negative? The internegative? The interpositive? The “answer positive”? In other words - how many generations away from the negative can we get in such a complex shot as the one I mentioned from Star Wars 77?
And another question 😃 From what I though, original negatives are the film reels which came out of the camera equipment, correct? But many people all over the internet (I think even here on ot.com) use the term to describe a finished shot with integrated optical effects, or is it just me?
For this particular question, it’s a bit more complicated, but let’s use your example. This shot is made up of different shots or “elements” as it’s called in SFX parlance. We have the:
- Live action shot of them looking out the cockpit into a green screen.
- The TIE fighter
- The Death Star
- The Star field
For shots 1, 2 and 3 you would have had to have made a traveling matte for each of them so that’s an additional 3 elements added. Traveling mattes are basically very high contrast copies of the original blue screen shots and help keep the elements separate from each other on the final assembled shot and not exposed on top of each other.
An optical printer is a simple machine. In essence, it’s just a projector shining into a camera. You load the elements into the projector, you load unexposed negative into the camera and away you go. Once you’re done, you process the negative that was in the camera and, voila! You have people in a space ship, looking out of a window. Take that to the filmmakers and the negative cutter will splice that footage in accordingly.
Of course, it’s much more difficult than that, but that’s the gist.