Today's Door Prize
If you're producing narrative content, one thing almost every script contains are doors. Take a look at a script. They almost always contain characters walking through doors, opening doors, doors locked, doors opening slowly, doors being slammed. Front doors. Office doors. Hallway doors. Bedroom doors. Bookshop doors.
They're everywhere, and as you can tell, I notice them, and used to be spooked by them -- but not anymore.
I was always nervous when I saw door scenes in scripts, because as real and as great as our Unreal Engine sets are, doors are hard to fake. We used to require workarounds such as having actors reach toward a virtual door, cut to another shot, add the sound of a door opening and closing, and cut to the actor in the other room. It worked, but it would be nice if we didn't need to fake it.
But we figured out how to do it, so we're not scared of door scenes anymore. In fact, not only can we film the scenes as written in the script, with our process, it actually sells the whole virtual set. In peoples' minds, if people are going through doors into other rooms or outside, it MUST be real. It doesn't even cross a viewer's mind that the spectacular set that the characters are in doesn't exist.
Here's how we did it. First, we built a self-supporting apparatus to which we could attach doors in frames. We surrounded it on both sides and the top with four foot green panels. We purchased a variety of doors in frames (interior, exterior, doors that swing in, and matching doors that swing out).
We then position our real doors in the same position as the virtual doors in the Unreal Engine set, adjust the virtual doors and virtual door frame to match our real doors -- and it's flawless.
So we can now follow scripts exactly without compromise or fakes, and our sets are "sold" to the viewer like never before.
A real "door prize".
