Interesting webpage. It’s a collection of photos of movies being made before the the post-production special effects were added in.
It makes me think this would make an interesting special feature for some DVD release. Give us the “original” version of some blockbuster movie like The Avengers, showing us what it looked like before the post-production effects were added.
If you search around the web/youtube for ‘dailies’ you’ll probably be able to find even more of these.
Dailies are (more or less) footage with very little post production to give the actors/crew/directors/producers a feel for how the day’s shooting went and to see if they need to reshoot anything.
I’m making my first short film, and I opted to film it entirely on a greenscreen, because I couldn’t find or afford the locations I wanted, plus it’s steampunk and needed to look distinctive and fantastical. I do VFX as a hobby, so that wasn’t in any way daunting.
So I made sure that everyone was briefed on where they were, what they were looking at, and how to react to the invisible things, and I provided small pieces of set, something tangible that helped them picture the scene.
Actors are trained to use their imagination in every film, they have to take themselves out of the real world and into the artificially constructed story being told even when it’s just a domestic drama, so this extra step of imagining the locations or characters they’re interacting with is not that difficult for them really. Theatrical actors have to do it a lot by default, which helps too. They trust their Directors to tell them what they’re supposed to be doing, where they’re supposed to be looking, and where the shot fits into the scene as a whole, so that the end result is going to look good.