Yes and it was a massive manual effort. In a way they acknowledged that keying does not really work all the way and having that unnatural color everywhere in the set is not worth it. It’s a massive production with heavy VFX work so not something you can apply to your own production. Sand screen and roto sections of this discussion are interesting.
this is the approach that stop motion uses, except they get to keep the camera in the same place. its still not perfect because of spill from the background onto the foreground and requires additional masking and cleanup.
im familiar with this work and specifically they tried replicating the sodium vapor style approach but what worked for poppins level isnt actually good enough for today. Specifically you still end up with light spill that contaminates the foreground, especially for things like the fresnel reflections on the side of a face. the magenta idea was to still do what is basically a color difference key, but increase the color separation between fg and bg by lighting the two with different opposite colored lights. then using a ml model to recover the original fg color.
youd have to train it to also generate and st map of the distortions but creating the ground truth version of that from the synthetic data would add a lot more to render. also its very easy to plausibly fake, its not something humans are good at seeing and knowing its wrong. you can tell its completely missing but accurate vs just distorted in a plausible way is not something most brains are tuned to notice.
the general problem with any technique that isnt just throw some vaugely green thing behind our actors is that setting up complicated tech like this on an actual film set is extremely expensive. both the time it would take and the risk of it not working. so you end up with a dedicated permanent stage install but now you need to get the actors and crew to that place. better keys isnt a bad enough problem to justify that effort/cost. even the highly touted "virtual production" mandalorian stuff where you just put a big led wall behind the actors has shown to be more expensive than traditional vfx unless you tightly control the creative or approach.
And all the people aware of the production technique watch it and imagine the characters saying "We can't run from the monster in different direction, our virtual production stage is precisely this big!"
Also enjoyed this, similar frustration at not being able to use powerups in a loss condition. Never got to the state where it felt like the "board fights back".
This comment above about difficulty made me wonder if there are more interesting things to do with the unclear-able blocks that would both let you ramp
the difficulty and achieve more of your vision. A few off the cuff ideas:
* enemy blocks that are clearable if you make a row and a column through them
* enemy blocks that require to be surrounded by n deep blocks to resolve
* enemy blocks that automatically pop into single cell holes
* enemy blocks that grow by infecting neighboring blocks over time or the more other rows you clear
* enemy blocks that require multiple row clears to resolve
the thought is having a few types with each enemy block needing a different strategy to resolve would give you more levers on how to control difficulty and give you more variation to the strategy and more agency to defeat them. powerups is kinda a deus-ex-machina currently. you dont feel earned satisfaction when you clear an enemy block.
Thank you so much for your feedback; these are really interesting contributions!
The idea of giving blocked cells more functionality is excellent, especially being able to clear those 'enemy blocks' by crossing both a row and a column over them simultaneously. It's brilliant. I'm going to think more about it and see if it fits the core essence of the game.
I also like the idea of having different types of blocks with various functionalities. Very well thought out.
I wasn't familiar with the expression 'deus ex machina,' that's interesting! ;)
awesome glad you liked it. id love to try it out again if you implement any of them. idk what else to call the black squares so "enemy" felt right for the board fights back vibe.
another nice thing i thought of with enemy block types idea is that you don't need to look anywhere but the board if you get rid of powerups that you just have so your whole interface gets simpler. if you still needed powerups you could have them show up as normal pieces in the chain of pieces.
it def starts to veer into more of a classic tetris how far can you go vibe than maybe the puzzle thing you are going for, but maybe its actually two games. puzzle mode is as now but starts with a fixed set or
fixed progression of enemys. you finish the puzzle when you defeat them all. winning then is time or rows cleared or minimum number of pieces even. infinite mode is more like the current. or classic tetris, how far can you go while new enemies spawn in of increasing number and difficulty. winning is how many enemies you clear + lines + time
I call the 'enemy blocks' 'blocked cells', but I actually like 'enemy blocks' better! :)
Regarding changing the game dynamics by having power-ups appear as just another piece in the game, I think that would overcomplicate the gameplay and alter the flow of the game too much. I don't really see it as an option right now. I prefer the infinite game mode.
id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?
I think we're talking fast food rather than nicotine.
We know that fast food is bad for us. But fast food companies keep putting the things that we like into it. So a lot of people, when tasting actual, real, good-for-you, food decide that they prefer fast food. Other people are aware that fast food is bad for them and prefer real food. It's a choice that we leave up to the individual. Unfortunately we then allow the fast food companies to advertise so they can affect the choice.
We don't really have an answer for this as a culture. We should make the fast food companies responsible for the harms they're causing, but we don't have a mechanism for that. We could stop them advertising, as some countries have done, but that starts a whole process of questions about what the government can and can't do that ends up in bad places.
I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.
We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time
where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social
movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)
still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.
i have that rule and the same exception for the 0. it feels like its "cyber" look done actually right with proper design (i dont let other inferior designs steal the word cyber). i would also add any decently good* ev minivan that is actually available to buy in the us.
*vw buzz fails the good test for no one pedal driving and the price for what you get is outta wack. though lots of the 1st gen ones are still sitting on car lots so maybe that could cross the exception barrier if they go for cheaper.
espresso machines are maybe in a different class of "coffee maker" but it seems like even the cheapest of those is pretty easy to service/repair/source parts.
or in some cases even upgrade to improve capabilities...
I did the gaggiauino mod to my gaggia classic and basically everything in there is just pipes and wires... the most complicated single part on the original is the vibratory pump. I'm pretty sure i could keep that same machine going indefinitely with access to parts.
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