Just saw some behind the scenes footage of how CGI is done in movies like planet of the apes (actors in spandex suits & other little technology on the suits— presumably to identify spots with joints/limbs?) and in this specific case, the actors were wearing deep blue spandex suits.
I imagine this particular color selection had to do with shooting the scene in a forest— green suits would be more difficult to distinguish against a background with green foliage— but are there any other variables that are considered? I was just wondering why they would choose blue over, say, hot pink— I imagine some of the plants might have blue undertones and I would think that hot pink would also stand out and make it easier to add CGI. Are there any colors that are off limits, or don’t do the job as well (obviously dark/non-neon colors would be difficult to work with, but what about highlighter yellow or tangerine, or bright magenta?)?
Additionally any fun facts/video resources about film production would be cool & much appreciated! I just learned about the “pink haze” in copies of sailor moon apparently resulting from the degradation of the cyan & yellow inks and I find that super interesting, so I’d love any filmmaking facts along those lines. Thanks in advance!
In: Technology
Depending on how close the foreground and background objects are (or objects to be matted out versus objects to retain), a consideration can also be scattering/diffuse reflection of the matte colour onto other objects close by (which the viewer will then notice as an unnatural colour tint). That’s less of a problem with dark blue, but can be an issue with green, and other hypothetical bright/strong colours.
Yellow would be too close to white/skin tones.
A couple of decades ago, for their studio news, the BBC pioneered using a retroreflective cloth matte (which looks like a silky grey most of the time) but if you then put a small coloured LED ring-light around the camera lens, the retroreflective cloth lights up brightly in the colour just from that particular angle of the camera. I guess the LED ring-lamp lets you swap between blue and green at the flick of a switch (to avoid particular colours on clothes), but also because you don’t have a large area of coloured cloth it avoids the colour-casts (and simplifies the complication of evenly illuminating a traditional coloured-matte background).
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005nby0](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005nby0)
Or a newer youtube video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NYZxu4G3B4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NYZxu4G3B4)
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