ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 1, when a character or object is fi lmed for later compositing, it is photographed over a bluescreen. By fi lming an object in front of a uniform solid blue backing the computer can more easily detect it from the background and create, or “pull” a matte for compositing. Pulling the matte for a composite is a very high art and is the cornerstone of digital compositing. The starting point of a good composite is a good matte, and in the real production world, you are constantly trying to pull good mattes from bad bluescreens. While we may call the process bluescreen, the color of the backing screen can also be green or red, the other two primary colors. For the sake of simplicity we will refer to all of them as bluescreens regardless of their actual color.
