I worked at Introvision on Darman, Flight of the Intruder, If Looks Could Kill, Miracle Landing .... and several TV commercials...tons of hard work... and very fun !!!!
I was thinking how they included the foreground elements. Which the actors on stage walked behind. But you can see classic mattelines. So they were rotoscoped and printed back together. Fascinating stuff.
@@WinSchutten There were set pieces covered with Scotchlight reflective material, and as long as the edges of the set pieces lined up with those of the image the efect worked.
This system was state of the art back when Army of Darkness was shot in 1991. Any stop motion shots with live action humans used this process. Bruce Campbell had many fight scenes where he was using timed choreographed moves to match up with an opponent that he couldn't even see. Today we have the virtual reality Volume which is used to shoot The Mandalorian, where the background is generated in real time by computers, and the camera can move and change perspective
I guess it was already on its way out by then...at least with one foot out of the door. Some of the larger effect houses already dabbled in digital compositing at that time. Did my first bits of DC at film school in '91. The school had purchased a number of SGI boxes as well as film scanners and printers just a few months earlier. I already had some paintbox experience by that time from working with an older Quantel system (this one used SD sources only). The SGI system was hooked up to a film scanner and an array of HDDs. I could grab short sequences on my own without further help of a lab. It pulled clean keys with one single click. It allowed me to draw alpha mattes and see the results in almost real time. Stacking layers upon layers without any generational loss. Curve tools for color correction(a hassle doing that optically) and even something like a primitive planar tracker for plate stabilization. It was like magic to my young (and very naive) brain.
Fascinating visual effect! Producer George Pal has a demo reel of how he planned to use Introvision on RU-vid for his proposed War of the Worlds television show. I assume Introvision has been replaced today by CGI Virtual Sets.
I wondered the same thing. I am trying to find detailed plans on it. I bought a beam splitter years ago from Edmund Scientific for another purpose, but would like to try this.
dur66 from what I’ve read about the process, you need a projector and a massive reflective screen. The projector bounces the plate image off the beam splitter, then off the screen, and then back through the splitter and into the camera. The camera catches the plate image from the reflective screen, plus the live actor, in front of the background or behind any reflective shapes placed in the foreground. The benefit of doing this method over something like chromakey is that it was all done in-camera, with no post-processing needed.
@@alphabassist you are correct. The background image was projected at low intensity via beam splitter from the front, but only light that hit the reflective screen was visible to the cameras perspective.
@K.D.P. Ross No. Front projection . The scotchlight screen in the rear of the set reflects the projected image light directly back to its source, which because of the beam splitter was in line with the camera lens.
