We’ve heard for centuries that the eyes are the window to the soul. If that’s the case, then the heart and soul of Hollywood is coated in green screen-tinted glasses. So often, we see green rectangles reflected in glasses of our favorite characters, not only in episodic streaming, but even running rampant in Hollywood blockbusters. However, some VFX houses have attempted to do justice to this ongoing issue. Nearly every movie or episodic streaming show is shot digitally, quite often utilizing green screen. Some compositors will overly blur and remove the chroma in the reflections on the character’s sunglasses as can be seen in Hot Tub Time Machine. Since artists cannot just blur out unwanted green screen reflections in a character’s clear eyeglasses some will attempt to shift the hue so that it that might potentially match a reflection from a light source found off-camera in the surrounding scene.
Wonder Woman 1984, 2020, missed the boat in a variety of scenes where the green screen reflections clearly seen in Cheetah’s glasses weren’t disguised in post-production.
In Wonder Woman 1984 Kristin Wiig’s character can be seen in a variety of scenes with a blatant stamp of raw green screen reflections in her glasses. It’s a glaring misstep in modern day cinema, and it’s more common that one would think. In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from Disney’s Lucasfilm, the character Voller, played by Mads Mikkelsen, has a recurring series of scenes throughout the film with saturated, magenta reflections in his glasses. Since there is no light source in the scene with this tint this series of reflections was an attempt to remove the obvious green screen. Sometimes, even when the characters aren’t shot against green screen, some of the set pieces and background elements are. In some cases, even on-set monitors are to blame for introducing these visual blemishes. At least the VFX artists working on this Indy film took the time to attempt to tweak the chroma values of these glaring windows to the soul. I think it’s ironic that Voller’s eyeglass reflections were tinted magenta in Dial. I wonder if that color was intentional as it gives a nod to the concept of one wearing rose-tinted glasses. Did it become a visual symbol of his passion to discover and experience the truth to Archimedes’ time-bending dial?
Lucasfilm’s artists tweaked the reflections in Voller’s glasses in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 2023, by shifting the reflection’s green hue to a saturated magenta.
In Hot Tub Time Machine, 2010, the film’s compositors tracked the sunglasses and applied a heavy blur in order to disguise the apparent on-set reflections in them.
Remember the old man on Saturday Night Live portrayed by Dana Carvey that complained that the current state of life wasn’t even close to how great things were when he was growing up. He’d say things like “Back in my day…” Well, at 51 I feel that I’ve become that same grumpy old man except I am complaining about: inch marks being substituted for quotation marks, jiggly retiming, strobing, incorrect motion blur, HDR overbright distractions, business card-sized billboard type, green screen reflections, and logo homogenization with a side order of overused sound libraries leaving us, the audience, wanting less, not more. Quality rather than never-ending quantity of rehashed stories, each tweaked in order to pander directly to certain groups of people. It applies to all things, especially to storytelling. Prove to us that original stories still exist; something new, original, and exciting. Please stop pandering to the “modern audience” by shifting all of our favorite stories attempting to have your content less controversial. How about ignite the passion that existed in film for decades? Story. Dialogue. Blocking. Twists. Turns. Cliffhangers. Infuse what we loved about movies from the past. Dare to go against the grain of pandering to the masses.