Computer Screens

As with all movies dealing with something military, computer screens are an essential part of many scenes. However, for the amateur film maker, filming a computer or TV screen presents problems. The first and biggest is the refreshing of the image. Most cameras pick up the image being refreshed, and the result is a screen with lines going up and down, blocking the image and degrading the overall appearance considerably. The second problem is image quality and color. The camera will by nature correct itself to the color of the immediate area. This causes the filmed computer or TV image to appear either washed out or blurry.

Operation Room Check used a variety of methods to overcome this. The first was a simple overlay. In some instances, the screen was fully visible to the camera, so a pre-rendered video was resized to the computer screen on film and overlayed on that screen.