The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.
I guess current pipelines depends a lot on chroma key for the matte so isolating the actors cheaply might be hard with such complex backgrounds? Seems like it might not be long until we can automate that in such a controlled environment though.
I don’t see why it’s so absurd, with how cheap display tech has become recently. Ambitious, maybe, but it seemed to work pretty well in The Mandolorian.
Yeah, from what I saw they originally took the plunge to build the ‘tank’ due to the armour but ended up using it for almost everything because it was so flexible and convenient.
Then you have to also model all the other actors and the entire rest of the scene, including practical effects. Otherwise you get Phantom Menace style 3D visuals with close-enough cube maps that end up looking very game-y.
At least on The Mandolarian this is what happened. Everything behind the actors in the camera's frame would be green while the rest of the volume was used to have a lowres lighting reference for the scene. So essentially it would be a moving green screen. The Unreal output was never directly used in the finished show.
If you just watch the show you can see the Volume screens pretty clearly. The transition from the real set floor to the floor in the screen is usually pretty obvious.