Bluescreen technology
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The set-up was as follows. There were two identical bluescreen rooms, each with three walls and no ceiling. They were built adjacent to each other in the center of Angila TV's large Studio E on Magdalen Street in Norwich. The area for the helpers was set up in the corner of the same studio.
Mostly, the right-hand blue room was used for superimposing the dungeoneer onto the background, while the left-hand room was used for live close-ups of hand-operated puppets such as the dragon's head, and the flying dragon.
The right-hand room used a luminescence-sensitive chromakey system, so live shadows which were cast affected the brightness of the superimposed dungeon graphics. The room was reasonably consistently lit; any variations in brightness of the walls was transferred to the graphics, but this didn't usually matter as it was quite subtle and the shape of the real/virtual rooms typically matched up anyway.
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Some exhaustive, if not definitive, information here. Thanks to all involved - it's a fascinating read.
Welcome to the forum, btw, spacehog. You're obviously very much in the know about what exactly went on when the series were being made. I'm guessing that you were involved in some way. How so, please? I'm very curious.
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You guess right - I worked for Anglia TV for a bit which involved a few days doing menial tasks on the Knightmare set during pre-production. There was a surreal Sunday when I was alone on that set all day, babysitting a computer doing some rendering. Very strange to wander around when it's all quiet!
Incidentally I also worked for Televirtual for a while, editing motion capture data.
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Illusion - while you're adding stuff to the site, just noticed this (for comprehensiveness's sake!):
The lady in the photo in the smirkenorff section whom you have captioned "stage manager (we think)" is in fact Claire Whittenbury, Assitant Producer of Knightmare.
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I'm working on a project using chromakey. I was told there is software available for the keying process. I've searched for this, with no luck. Can anyone help me?
This is for a small project. Not much in the way of a budget, however we already have the paint and cameras
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I don't know whether you have access to these but programs such as Adobe Premier, Adobe After Effects and Vegas Video all have features/ Plugins avaliable for doing Chromakey work.
(All of these are avaliable via the 'Long John Silver' method but I'll leave the specifics for yourself to find... )
If all else fails, try having a look around some of the download sites and places like 'PC Format'. They occasionally have utilities that could do these kind of things for you.
Hope that Helps!
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