The new Land of The Lost film is about a crazy scientist Rick Marshall who gets sucked back through time in a prehistoric land full of ravenous dinosaurs and fantastic creatures.

Chased by dinosuaurs, Marshall, Will and Holly must rely on their only ally – a primate called Chaka (Jorma Taccone) – to navigate out of the hybrid dimension. Escape from this routine expedition gone awry and they’ll be heroes. Get stuck, and they’ll be stuck forever in the Land of the Lost. Featuring sensational special effects and Will Ferrell’s trademark humour, Land of the Lost is a wild ride of comedy and adventure.Will Ferrell turns to the camera with a look of the utter terror as a Tyrannosaurus Rex bears down, pinning him against the edge of a cliff, leaving him nowhere to go. He screams in fear, and attempts to elude the giant dinosaur, jumping to another ledge, just out of T-Rex’s reach. Being a photographer, myself, even in this tense moment in Land of the Lost (2009), I can’t help but notice that stretched behind him his a massive expansive desert, reaching to the far edges of the horizon, all beneath a perfectly blue sky, without a cloud in sight. The conditions for shooting are perfect. Some directors might wait days for weather like this. Whole movies might be held up, causing expensive delays, just to wait for weather this good. But the creators of Land of the Lost, (a movie about time travel) and what seems like more and more movies these days, are saving a little bit of time themselves. And this is all because of the green screen, and what the green screen has brought to modern day cinema.

No longer do producers, actors, and directors have to spend days upon days waiting for the weather to be just right, for the sun to be just the right angle, or for the time of year to be perfect. And they no longer need to make “mini” sets to create the illusion of a giant dinosaur pursuing our protagonist.
For movies like Land of the lost, 300, Terminator, Star Trek, Night at the Museum, and many more, scenes that were, in the past, shot in the reality of an outside set, are now shot in studios, in front of massive walls of green, beneath hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lighting equipment all arranged to a specific position to create a perfect green screen studio.

Now, Hollywood directors, shoot scenes at their pace. They control the variables now. Because of the technology of “Chroma-keying,” these directors can replace whatever is green in the shot (don’t wear that green shirt you really like to the shoot) with whatever they want – be it a giant, expansive desert, or the inside of a cave. The work after shooting is done for the most part in computers for the rest of the production. Editors, and CG artists work to manipulate lights and colors to make the scene look “real.” and the results seem generally positive. The special effects look “real,” for all intensive purposes and, as a result, in the coming years, it’s reasonable to expect more and more movies to be produced this way. It will be interesting to see how this changes the film industry in the years to come as more and more movies transition from “real” to “green.”

But it’s not just big Hollywood Features that are getting the green screen treatment,
In New York city film & TV as: Naomi Watts , Tina Fay, Chris Angel, Whoopi Goldberg, Mario Lopez and David Allen Grier are using the latest green screen technology to be seen in what appear to be multimillion dollar sets at the American Movie Company.

Here and at other high end green screen stages around the city cutting edge digital sets are replacing old fashioned, expensive physical sets to give maximum production value to new shows.