Hollywood, the land of make-believe, has always walked a tightrope between reality and illusion. However, in recent years, the balance seems to have shifted dramatically.

My jaw dropped when I saw a YouTube video showcasing VFX work done on The Wolf of Wall Street. I would have thought that Martin Scorsese was more or less immune to the world of green screen, but no, here were imaginary locations stitched together or created wholesale out of CGI. I had much the same reaction towards the vaunted grittiness of Joker, when behind the scenes footage showed great swathes of CGI being painted on the cityscape in the background because it wasn’t gritty enough. Physical sets, meticulously crafted by production designers like Guy Hendrix Dyas, and even costumes, painstakingly imagined by costume designers like Kym Barrett, are facing an existential threat: the ubiquitous green screen. This raises a crucial question – is the capturing of physical reality becoming a relic of the past in filmmaking? The allure of green screen is apparently irresistible because of its supposed cheapness. (This depends on outrageous working conditions for VFX artists as has become widely known now) It allows for the creation of fantastical worlds, impossible locations, and dazzling visual effects. Blockbusters like Avatar and Inception wouldn’t exist without it. However, this reliance comes at a cost. The meticulously built sets, painstakingly researched by production designers, become relegated to concept art that is inexpertly realised by stressed software jockeys. The tangible textures, subtle interplay of light and shadow on a physical costume: these elements that add key depth and realism to a scene are sacrificed for the sterile “perfection” of the green screen.

This decline in the importance of physical sets puts the future of production designers in question. Their skillset – the ability to translate a script’s vision into a tangible space, to breathe life into a fictional world through physical construction; to create, as Alex McDowell did for Fight Club, a building that appears to be decaying from the inside out, even as the narrator’s psyche similarly implodes –  may seem increasingly redundant. But before we write their obituary, let’s consider a new technology that this seachange has almost made obsolete before it even arrived: drone photography. Drones offer a unique opportunity to capture breathtaking cinematic landscapes. Smaller and more nimble (and safer) than helicopters, they can get remarkably close to actors and then soar with astonishing speed into wide vistas. Imagine soaring above a rugged mountain range, or weaving between towering skyscrapers, in a low budget production that could never dream of hiring a helicopter rig: drone footage can add a sense of epic scale and immersive sweep to any scene. Recently the TV show Catch Me a Killer utilised drone photography to great effect. Showcasing the varied landscapes of South Africa as Micki hunted serial killers in several provinces,  it helped give a sense of the geography of crime scenes, as well as providing great emotional impact to her nervous arrival at a particularly intimidating new police headquarters. These are the two uses I first wrote about when the BBC started using drones in documentaries: explaining geography, and depicting emotional isolation.

This application of drone technology isn’t new. Shows like Supernatural and the second revival of The X-Files were using drones almost a decade ago to capture startling establishing shots, and provide a cinematic sweep to the simplest scenes of characters moving thru locations. Low budget feature films gratefully embraced them too. The enigmatic opening sequence of Don’t Breathe wouldn’t be the same without the drone’s unsettling slow descent through the dilapidated Detroit setting. So, why has drone cinematography seemingly stagnated in cinema since? The answer, much like the almost total abandonment of 3-D, lies in the extreme overreliance on green screen. When everything is shot on a green screen soundstage, there’s no physical location for a drone to showcase. The actors are adrift in a sea of pixels, and the vast landscapes they traverse are likely just as digitally generated as their weightless capes. (I’m looking at you, Doctor Strange) There’s a distinct difference between the visceral thrill of a drone soaring through a real canyon and the weightless, sterile feeling of a digitally created CGI simulation. Drone footage, when used judiciously, could ground the most fantastical story with a sense of physical reality. Just look at the difference between The Lord of the Rings, with its sweeping aerial photography locating its characters in rugged mountain landscapes hiding from a flock of Saruman’s scouting birds, and the overlit wall to wall CGI madness of The Hobbit’s escape in barrels down a river, leaving a thoroughly wasted potential tour de force.

The opening episodes of season 3 of SEAL Team set in Serbia set a new bar for action choreography with drone photography. But that was October 2019 and Covid prevented anyone really rising to its challenge for a while. Until Michael Bay, bored out of his mind during lockdown, decided to make one of his small personal movies, and went wild with drones. Ambulance can use drones because for the most part it is not shot on a green screen soundstage. At times Bay’s use of drones is vertigo-inducing as they dash across rooftops, start an establishing shot by falling down the side of a building and twisting about. (It also seems at times damn unsafe, as the drones shoot past actors in enclosed spaces at the speed of sound) But it is extremely telling that a man who loves to roll cars and blow stuff up is the one who rises to the challenge of using drone photography in cinema, because he can; because he is doing a lot of this stuff for real, in a physical location. The future of cinema must be about a return to reality. Green screen may allow for fantastical worlds, but without the foundation provided by physical sets or locations, those worlds feel hollow and derivative. A copy of a copy of a copy, so many swirling trash cans in the sky. Production designers are not digital set builders. Their irreplaceable skill set lies in crafting tangible worlds, imbued with texture and detail.

Costume designers too have a vital role to play in creating physical garments that translate to the screen with a depth and authenticity that CGI simply cannot match. People have spoken of the magical moment when an actor puts on the cape for the first time and the set goes silent as people suddenly behold Superman in their midst. By contrast poor old Benedict Cumerbatch is walking around with the knowledge that a weightless cape will be hurriedly added in post-production because that’s a better idea than actually designing and manufacturing and fitting a real cape for him to work with as Doctor Strange. And Tom Holland has been playing Spider-Man without the benefit of actually being able to look down at his body and see a red costume with a black spider logo. Ultimately, the magic of cinema lies in its ability to transport us – to make us believe in worlds both real and imagined. The point of Hollywood trickery was to fool the eye. Now our eyes are not fooled, but we are taken for fools by an industry that insists this is good enough. Nope. By embracing physical artistry and real locations, film-makers can continue to create experiences that resonate on a deeper level. The future of Hollywood may involve pixels, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of capturing the physical world that has always been the wellspring of cinematic truth. Without a return to reality, cinema risks becoming a mere shadow of its former self.