Thor Love and Thunder VFX blue screen and PlateLight

So after all the bad press around this one, and the whole Covid thing we stayed away from the theaters for this one. And besides I can wait 45 days to see a movie on a streaming service that I already have, still this would have been fun in the theater, honestly I really enjoyed the film. Sure it was really silly, but I enjoyed, even if Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher needed more screen time, and I honestly could have seen a full film with fat Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy.

What I really want to talk about though, is a couple of things from the behind the scenes.

The first is the blue screen. It looks like they did all blue screen instead of green screen (the norm for digital, but it reflects less light for spill), but what really blew me away was not just how inconsistent the screen was, with many layers and edges. And even more so was the fact that Thor’s army had blue elements, and they shot it on a blue screen! Now I have seen that done with the blue changed to another color so it can be changed in post, but with the blue on blue and an inconsistent blue screen they must be rotoscoping every frame? ARE THEY INSANE? I mean this be part of the whole Marvel Mistreating VFX artists. Why not use Green Screen, or change the color of the blue?

I wish that CINEFEX still existed!

The next thing was the sequence on the small Asteroid in the shadow realm, with the crazy lighting from it going around it’s sun so quickly. They used this tech PlateLight, which allows for multiple lighting setups to be shot at the same time.

I would love to see an explanation of how this is working. I am assuming it is a special camera and sensor, but how does it then match with other footage (maybe fine because of the B&W nature of this scene).