Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoilers

[Christopher]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

No way. There is no way in hell that there are jungles and cliffs and beaches like that anywhere near Toronto. And there's no way they could have such obvious greenscreen compositing in the driving scenes and yet have the actors perfectly integrated into the locations in other scenes. (It makes sense the driving sequences would be greenscreened for reasons of safety and convenience even if they did go to the actual locations.) You may be right about London, but they sure as hell went somewhere exotic for the Sri Lanka squences.

 

[Professor Zoom]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

No way. There is no way in hell that there are jungles and cliffs and beaches like that anywhere near Toronto. And there's no way they could have such obvious greenscreen compositing in the driving scenes and yet have the actors perfectly integrated into the locations in other scenes. (It makes sense the driving sequences would be greenscreened for reasons of safety and convenience even if they did go to the actual locations.) You may be right about London, but they sure as hell went somewhere exotic for the Sri Lanka squences.

I don't watch the show, so I don't know what it looked like.

But, I seriously doubt a basic network show could afford TO much of an exotic locale. Maybe Mexico or Hawaii. But still, green screen is still cheaper.

There was that youtube video floating around...it had clips of Ugly Betty and some other network shows using greenscreen that was INCREDIBLY well integrated.

Edited to add: this isn't the one that I was thinking of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv53RZBdDw&feature=related but it does have some surprising examples of environments. (Except for Kings...of course those buildings aren't real)

Edited AGAIN: Gr. Still not the one, but... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqNfT4p4wYQ

 

[Aragorn]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

Green screen is pretty bad on Covert Affairs. I think they have the worst driving green screen I've ever seen on a show. The night scene in London was obviously green screen. They even green screened the park scene.

In the second episode the bike chase (at least the beginning part) was obviously shot someplace exotic (second unit?), but the actual actors weren't there because the long shots were with stunt doubles and the closeup shots had bad green screen. How they handled the extras was quite funny though, since they were all just standing off to the side basically watching them film.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

Well, I did some research, since that's more useful than guessing. I found information on several pages, but here's the best summary, in showrunner Doug Liman's blog:

http://30ninjas.com/blog/doug-liman...-and-action-packed-are-not-mutually-exclusive

For the finale we’ve had a crew filming in Sri Lanka for about three weeks and we even got permission to fly Eion Bailey who plays Ben Mercer, to Sri Lanka to shoot. Normally the way we’ve been doing the show, we send a crew to these foreign countries but the stars stay in Toronto, both for insurance reasons and schedule demands. Flying the character Ben Mercer ups the level of realism. Since Bourne Identity it’s been important to me to give the audience the experience of traveling to these exotic locations and not fake it, but the exciting challenge is how to use visual effects to integrate the two shoots — Toronto and the exotic location — into one coherent episode. 10 years ago, we’d have to shoot 2nd unit in the foreign country and your actors would always be inside on a set. You’d see a double of Piper cross the street in Paris and Piper herself would walk into a building that would actually be in Toronto. Now, we have a great visual effects team whose members travel as part of our foreign shooting unit, and we’ve built a real institutional knowledge on our unique style of shooting so we can do exterior scenes in these foreign countries with our actors, who are actually in Toronto.

The season finale involves a massive motorcycle chase through the streets of Columbo and a finale fight sequence, 40 stories above the city, on an under-construction skyscraper. This all involves coordinating an action shoot in Sri Lanka with an action shoot in Toronto using stunt doubles in both cities and actors in Toronto (that obviously we don’t have in Sri Lanka.) When all is said and done, we ourselves won’t be able to remember what was shot in Toronto and what was shot in Sri Lanka with many of the shots will be digitally composited to include elements from both environments.

That's quite surprising. Given how obvious the greenscreen work is in their driving scenes, how can it be so flawless in other scenes?


Of course, I figure it's safe to assume that the Niagara Falls shoot was real, given that it's less than a 2-hour drive from Toronto.

 

[sojourner]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

Yea, the most obvious real shots were the ones showing Ben Mercer at night in Colombo. The cinematic style was totally different with the graininess.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

Well, even if they aren't sending most of the actors, it's great that they're actually sending second units to capture authentic location footage around the world, rather than trying to fake it all in Toronto. I'm still struck by what a terrible job FlashForward did of simulating Hong Kong on a Hollywood backlot.

 

[Sakrysta]

Re: Covert Affairs (Piper Perabo, new USA series) - Discussion & Spoil

Frankly, I wish they would just film the extra across the street and then show the star entering a local building. It's less jarring to my disbelief suspension than the terrible green screen shots.