Green screen always looks deceptively simple from the outside, just a flat coloured wall, a key, a bit of compositing and you’re done, but for Heiko Thies and the small team behind Loreley Productions in Germany it’s always been the edges that matter, the hair that doesn’t quite separate cleanly, the motion blur that refuses to sit still, the spill creeping into places you don’t notice until you’re already deep in post and everything suddenly slows down.
As director of photography Thies puts it, “green screen work was always a lot of guesswork, you always had to have lots of markers on the screen to track each shot in post,” which sounds manageable until you realise those same markers start showing up in all the places you don’t want them, crossing fine detail, interfering with transparency, making keying feel less like a process and more like negotiation, “this is super annoying during keying later on,” he says, especially when they sit right over things like hair edges where you’re already fighting for separation.
Loreley Productions didn’t begin with any of this pipeline thinking in mind, it started much smaller, a 10-minute Star Trek test episode around 2020, just a handful of fans led by Benjamin Schulz and Dennis Strauss building something for the love of it, then it slowly scales, more people come in, more ambition creeps into what is still essentially a spare-time operation, and by the time they reach Erstkontakt they’re suddenly working like a miniature studio, green screen everything, Unreal Engine environments, CGI ships and sets split between Heiko Thies on cinematography, compositing and most of the virtual production side, and Benjamin handling the heavier CGI work in 3ds Max, with both of them essentially carrying post between them, which is where the real weight of the workflow starts to show itself.
Making problems easier to fix
Now, any problems are now just part of the day-to-day workflow, such as camera moves that drift slightly because there aren’t enough tracking points in frame, shots that feel fine on set but fall apart once they go to Unreal Engine, little mismatches, and as Thies puts it, “more complex camera moves in 3D space might get lost if there are not enough elements in the shot for the tracker,” which becomes one of those constraints that sits behind every decision.
So instead of fighting around it, they change the way they’re actually looking at the shot while they’re making it, Lightcraft’s Jetset system becomes less of a tool and more of a kind of shared visual reference between set and post, a live window into what the composite might look like before it exists, and suddenly the process of blocking a scene stops being guesswork in the traditional sense because there’s something immediate to react to, something that already contains the virtual world while the physical one is still being lit and framed, “we can actually see an approximation of what the final shot will look like,” Thies says, and that alone shifts how they work with space, with movement, with even the simplest decisions like where an actor stands or how a camera travels through a corridor.
There’s a shot in Erstkontakt they keep coming back to, a long continuous move from the bridge of the Einstein-class USS Loreley through a tight corridor into another room where characters are already seated, nothing especially showy, but long takes on green screen can be hard to manage, so they plan it inside Jetset, run it, adjust it, mark the floor, run it again until the timing and camera movement start locking together, and Thies just calls it “one of those shots we’re very proud of,” which feels understated given how much usually has to go right for something like that to survive into the final cut.
Before Jetset Cine, that kind of alignment was far more manual, camera tracking data coming into Unreal and everything landing at a default origin point, meaning every environment had to be nudged into place after the fact, reshaped around the shot rather than the shot fitting the space, “every shot was imported with the tracked camera in the centre of the level at the origin point,” Thies explains, “we then had to move everything around to make it fit the scene, for every shot,” and layered on top of that was the physical mismatch between systems, Sony A7IV footage and iPhone tracking data never quite sitting in the same space without manual measurement of offsets, syncing everything again later in post just to get the illusion of coherence.
What changes things now is the accumulation of small automations, timecode sync, Autoshot linking takes between devices, live camera previews piped into Jetset through the Accsoon Seemo 4K so framing actually reflects what is being while shot, all of it reducing the distance between what’s happening on set and what ends up in Unreal Engine, and as Thies puts it, “the Cine version takes a lot of these steps and automates them, this saves so much time in post,” which in practice means less time rebuilding the same logic for every shot and more time actually working with the material itself.
The knock-on effect shows up immediately in how they judge a take, because once the tracking is visible and reliable in real time the green screen stops being something you only understand later, it becomes something you can verify in the moment, and that changes pacing on set completely, failed takes don’t get banked for later correction, they get redone while everything is still live, “we can check each take on set in Jetset to make sure the tracking worked flawlessly,” Thies says, “if there are any problems, we can immediately do another take,” which for a small team carrying the weight of a full episodic production is less about efficiency as a concept and more about simply keeping the process from spiralling outwards.
Green screen improved with AI?
One of the shifts is that the green screen itself stops needing to be managed in quite the same way, no more tracking markers scattered across the frame, no more worrying about them cutting through hair or soft focus areas where they always end up causing more harm than help, “no more tracking markers on the green screen,” Thies says, “we get much better keying results,” and that alone removes a whole layer of cleanup that used to sit waiting at the end of every shot.
The pipeline around it is still very hands-on though, nothing particularly industrial or formalised, edits are already happening in DaVinci Resolve while shooting is still ongoing, rough cuts built as footage comes in so problems surface early enough to still do something about them, “we always begin with a rough cut of the movie while we are still shooting,” Thies says, “that way we can spot problems early and reshoot if needed,” and from there everything moves through Fusion using node-based setups that get reused across shots, while Unreal renders slot back into the same timeline so there’s always a live sense of where the film actually is rather than where it might end up.
Even now they’re already testing where it might go next, including CorridorKey 2.0, an AI-based keying system still in development but already showing promise in early tests, “we had done extensive testing with the first release,” Thies says, “and the results were already very promising,” and it fits neatly into the same pattern as everything else they’ve adopted so far, less manual cleanup, fewer fragile steps, more of the process handled at source rather than deferred to post.
The Lorely team isn’t aiming for bigger spectacle or more ambitious visuals for their own sake, but is pushing towards a VFX and green screen pipeline where fewer things need to be fixed after the fact, where more of the shot is simply correct the moment it’s captured, and Thies, frames the end point in almost throwaway terms, “maybe there will be a holodeck scene using Gaussian splats in the future,” he jokes, but it had me thinking, it doesn’t feel like a leap away from what they’re already doing, just another step along the same line of thought, with fewer gaps between capture and composite, and everything they’ve built so far seems to be moving in exactly that direction.
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