Ted Newsom wrote:
Jim & gang-- they actually used a lot of blue screen in Superman--and, yeah, it was pretty crummy. First of all, no one seemed to have given any thought to the character's costume-- blue, for crying out loud. Duh! So you had composites where pieces of him disappeared. The blue-screen fly-bys in the original version of the film had to practically make him green-gray to keep the image together. This is particularly notieable on the flyby when he's racing past the mountains to save Jimmy Olsen from falling off the dam.
I've watched the subsequent releases of the film on dvd, and they seem to have tweaked things with modern color corrections. The costume is bright blue again. Lotsa wire work on this, too-- from the first Fortress of Solitude shot, through the entire Lois Lane love scene down through the landing-in-prison scene at the end. And I thought the Zopic front projection looked as soft as the old 40s process shots, but everybody seemed to think it was swell.
But for all that, it's all sweet and fun.
Hi Ted,

Thanks for reminding me, I couldn't remember where they used blue screen in the first film. I agree that the Zoptic shots do look a bit soft and washed out but I guess my perspective comes from having worked with front projection a number of times on films (though on a much smaller scale) and considering what they were working with I'm still very impressed with the results. I think they tried to mostly stay with front projection because, as you mentioned, the problem of doing blue screen with Superman's costume. Too bad they couldn't go with the yellow backing but I don't think that Sodium mattes work with anamorphic lenses because of the flange focal depth being too small to accommodate the dichroic prism. I found that the best looking process dupes usually involved having a VistaVision 8 perf background plate that we could photograph onto standard 35mm film with a 1.66:1 hard matte.
Hmmm, wonder if the Zoptic process ever used 65mm BG plates on any film?

Oh well, who cares about this old stuff anyway? Today we use CG and everything looks perfect. (That's a joke. .. I say, that's a joke, son.)

Hey, if anyone likes old time effects go on over to stopmotionanimation.com sometime and look under SPECIAL FX . > MATTE PAINTING for the topic
"those old time effects... they're good enough for me"
We're up to about 15 pages of photos and talk about the days before CG effects. Probably look hokey to the younger viewers but fun for some old guys like me.

Jim Aupperle


Last Edited By: Aupperle Dec 6 08 5:52 PM. Edited 8 times.