The veil chroma keying is just MIND BLOWING. I work on small productions VFX and I can tell you its very difficult to achieve that level of precision with today's standard digital tools.
At the time, the public was aware that the special effects were much better than any they had seen. It was considered quite marvelous, along with the good acting and fun music. It was talked about quite a bit when it came out in the theaters. But years later people mostly refer to the acting and music.
@@theseangle I know this was a while ago but Edison was notorious for stealing inventions. His life was essentially one lawsuit after another and unfortunately... he won most of them. Things like the lightbulb and modern moving pictures that are commonly accredited to his name are all stolen works. And man I feel super salty and cheated since my area is named after him tsk. Don't glorify guys that can't live up to the name
@@theseangleI hope you guys are aware but The corridor crew just rediscovered how to do the Sodium vapor process but with modern camera equipment and not having to find a way to create that rare crystal they lost that allowed them to do this amazing process. I really hope we see a resurgence of this in media projects because the more i learn the more I realize just how much of a pain green screen CGI work is to actually make it nice.. This is game changing
Rejoice! Paul Debevec has created a new inexpensively made prism to filter out the yellow light and Corridor Crew tested it out and it works perfectly.
In the new film (mary poppins returns) there is a huge amount of sequences that show fire and public lamps that shine in the exactly sodium yellow color mentioned in this video. Did someone else notice these detail? Is this a real reference and tribute to the achivements of Mr. Vlahos, or am I just imagining things?
What a pleasantly informative read. I’m a live action director and I found this little feature supercalifragalistic! Applause. At this time of Poppins mania what you did here is timely indeed. Merry Christmas. Well done!
Having been a VFX fan since seeing Star Wars in 1977, I always look for the telltale signs of blue screen work when watching older movies. Particularly when it comes to hair and material flapping. Mary Poppins blew my mind, and I now have the answer about how Julie Andrews’ veil was flawlessly photographed and the process behind it. It’s bugged me for years because the effect is undetectable and perfect. This was a truly groundbreaking film on so many levels.
The magic and beauty of this great classic movie never fades. It is as awesome as the remake (Mary Poppins Returns with Emily Blunt giving her own mesmerizing interpretation of this beloved whimsical nanny that has captured the hearts of the audience worldwide both young and old). I love this movie! Thank you, Mr. Vlahos for your great contribution.
Emily Blunt did an absolutely stupendous portrayal of Mary Poppins and arguably is the new Mary Poppins in her capacity as a highly talented actress and a sophisticated English woman. I hope July Andrews was invited to the premiere.
Friendship well actually the author of the series of stories of Mary Poppins disapproved of Disney creating a movie based on her work, that could easily explain why it took so long to finally put a sequel together.
When I was little I was conscious and so amazed of Mary Poppins combing the real world and animation. It is me of the most important movies in the history of cinema. A new Mary Poppins movie came out but you don't get as amazed as the first one, we are now used to seeing a mix of realistic animation and live action, how things have changed...
I’ve seen Mary Poppins countless times, and watched tons of documentaries about it, but never knew about this. Thanks for the new insight!!! I now have a renewed appreciation for this masterpiece!
Yes and no? Chroma keying translucent objects and falling particles like salt is still hard today, especially if you don't have a 4k camera or you're chroma-keying glass instead of a veil which has holes.
2:07 is an accurate description of how modern greenscreen works, but blue screen's a bit different. First, they would film against a bright blue screen, since blue's a primary color that won't mess with skin tones. Second, they take the "Blue" strip of film (in RGB Technicolor) and crank the contrast up until everything blue is brightest white, and everything not blue is darkest black. This way, there's essentially a moving version of the Glass Matte you described earlier. This film where there's a moving sillhouette cutout of the actor is used to expose the actor into the final film. Then, the matte is inverted, to create the one used for exposing the background into the final film.
If you look closer at jeans at 2:12 mark you can exactly see the limitations of the blue/green screen. Her jeans lost some color and it is noticeable. Now you can’t unsee it😅
Not only that but they have to change the color values and feathering to do green or blue screen so not only are you losing definition but also the color has slightly changed (either lighter color or darker)
No this wasn't "impossible to replicate". As it turns out, when Vlahos wanted to use the 589 nm line of a sodium vapor light for the creating of mattes, he contacted two former Technicolor engineers (who had just set up their own business) to see if they could modify an old Technicolor prism to select out the light from sodium vapor lamps. After a lot of trial and error, the answer was that, yes, they could, but only with great difficulty: The prism ended up consisting of 41 layers of glass plates coated to very specific thicknesses that were then presicely sandwitched together. This was complicated, but it meant you got about 80% of the sodium vapor light to your matte film at a loss of light outside the relevant 1 nm band going to your regular film was less than 1%. It worked like a charm. The sodium process iself as a filmmaking tool wasn't perfect - the screen needed to be lit with sodium lights, while the actors obviously couldn't be - so there had to be a little distance between the screen (or any other theoretical object to be matted out) and the actors. This also meant that floors could not easily be matted out. On the other hand, it worked as advertized, giving amazingly precise mattes even by today's standards. Vlahos ended up paying the prism people 700 dollars (about 6000 today) and walked away happy. As it were... Vlahos wasn't really a customer to them, as much as an excuse to develop the process of producing these prisms as a possible business venture, with his 700 dollars being merely a symbolic sum. When the next customer - Ub Iwerks - came along, they were done with charity and said "why, yes, we can make another... for 3000 dollars". Iwerks refused, and nobody else at the time appears to have been willing to pay that price for the prism. I don't know what became of the little prism business venture, except that I assume the two engineers moved on after some time of their sales hovering stably around zero. Instead of this prism, Iwerks used the same process, but accepted a loss of 2 stops of light to create the matte. This meant the process was not only expensive, but it required an ungodly amount of light to be used on the actors, creating a lot of problems both for the actors and the makeup department.
Yeah I’m insane Doritos wearing speedos what r those I like potatoes in the morning but no one knows smile ur an iconic queen oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.... ahhhhhhh...... Like if u love that song!🤣🤣🤣
This film mastered the morphing of hand drawn and live action which was done in the 1940s with the three caberellos and 20 years earlier in alice comedies which was walt’s earlist work
In 1960 Mary popins disliked the movie since it was passing the fact in the book she put her soul and her all in the book. And Walt missed that and she cried through the whole movie and told Walt how she felt after it and he just shrugged his shoulders
Fun fact: the Cristal was actually a 1 in existence object, there is not a another one like it, and they lost it, yup they lost the only one in existence, the key to 100% perfect mat creation, and we'll likely never get it again
I wonder why nobody tried to recreate Vlahos prism. Maybe it's like Starlite (fireproof paint which secret gone with his creator), something that nobody else in the world knows how to do. Maybe Vlahos foorgot how exactly he made the first prism, and so could not create a second one.
They started with blue and green but moved on to yellow. Although yellow looked better it required more expensive cameras. When technology improved, filmmakers moved back to the cheaper green and blue screen processes.
Really they jumped from blue to green. Remember, only one camera ever existed that could do this yellow (sodium vapor) process. Blue is used in film because, on top of being furthest from flesh tones, the light sensitive grain of the blue film strip was the finer than the grain of the red and green strip. The finer grain effectively had more "resolution". That's for film. For digital they use green. The reason for that is because digital cameras have more green photosensors than red or blue. Like... twice as much. Human eyes are most sensitive to green after all. And since digital cameras have so much more resolution for the green channel, green is the best choice for chroma key.
Very clever that kind of yellow orange is realy rare on the entire color spectrum, we could eventualy using that process in the digital camera, on matrix reloaded they use purple chroma key for some action scene, but i must admit that his sodium process work very well on blur image like in the birds movie from hitchcock.
Remember that using the modern release of Mary Poppins footage includes the addition of remastered modern technology to enhance the original movie and effects that Disney did.
George Melies used double exposures yes, but not double exposure mattes, which is a term invented for this video. He did not use a glass panel in front of the camera. Does that really make any sense? If he did, how did the black mark on the glass follow him around? Did they move the glass to follow his movements? They must have had another glass panel that was stationary for the table heads. No, the background on the set was black, and he put a black bag over his head to make it disappear. He did rewind the film 3 times, and shoot his head in three different places, all against the black background, with a possible fake half of a table top around his neck. Yes, it was that simple. That shot in King Kong was not a double exposure, but a rear screen shot, the Dracula shot and the Chaplin shot are different types of matte paintings. The effects guys had many compositing techniques before we jump into green screen. Disney got this matting system from Rank film lab in England. They had already been using it on films like Mysterious Island and others. This is a really poorly researched video, and I am now checking out of it. I believe I must have made a comment like this before, but I don't see it anywhere, so if I did, and it is among the missing, here is a new one. Big thumbs down.
Disney+ has released "The Island at the Top of the World" on streaming recently. I watched it growing up and always wondered why the villain's eyes had moving flames in them in one scene. He's standing in front of a roaring fire. I'm guessing it's the sodium vapor filming process.
While I agree with all the technical information within this video on how it works, didn't Disney technically use Sodium Vapor Process in the film The Parent Trap (1961) before Mary Poppins (1964)? I think the popularity/success of the film definitely helped get to where we are now with greenscreen and greenscreen effects, but I also think we should give credit where credit is due: that being that The Parent Trap was the first film to use this technique.
Often films with smaller budgets are often testing ground for tech that is planned to be used for other films with bigger budgets. It’s very possible the camera was used in The Parent Trap to tweak and perfect the technique for Mary Poppins. It wouldn’t be the first time Disney did this. There was a Silly Symphonies short Walt and the other animators made before they worked on Snow White because they wanted to test working with colored animation. Even today the short films Pixar has made are often test films to try out new animation techniques/software.
@@Luka1180 are you somebody important? I'm asking because I didn't see the need for your reply, other than to call attention to yourself because you are someone important in the movie making details brought up in this video and subsequent comments. So I ask again, who are you and what do you know about Disney animation? Here's you're chance big guy... Time to show off... We're waiting 🤔
If they make a new one, they should have Julia Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in it as well. And depending on their current acting and singing abilities, they could be given a large or a small part. Perhaps they could simply be a respectable and elegant couple, sitting in a semi-prominent location in a restaurant, café or city park. Or they could be a couple that the new Mary Poppins bumps into on the street. She nods them an apology. Then has a little revelation. She stops and turns, to look at them again, but they have inexplicably disappeared. And as she walks past a used bookstore, there in the display window is a copy of the original Mary Poppins book.
A few minutes in you confused double exposure with having a matte painting between the camera and the physical set. Some of the "double exposure" clips you showed are actually not.
