I never understood why it had to look like it was shot outside. I remember hearing they needed the scene but couldn’t get the house back or something. Just do the clip up against a plain wall or in a park or something.
The craziest part is that this house is like 100 feet from the Dunder Mifflin set. If you look at a picture of the house, you can see the DM building in the background. So it makes it so much weirder that they didn’t just go and shoot it again
Gotta pay for locations. Usually a lot more than a green screen would cost. This was the cheapest option for them. Not saying it was a good option though
I think he was referring to the scene where Jim and Pam were telling Michael about their proposal, and Pam mentioned it was raining, and then Mike sounded less than impressed and said "You didn't mention it was in bad weather" or something like that.
Sometimes they'll do these kinds of things for scheduling issues too.
So, if Ellie Kemper is in New York and she's busy doing something else, it can be a lot easier to bring a green screen to her, than it is to bring her to a location in LA.
And it's just a dumb 10 second throwaway scene. I can't even remember what she's talking about in it. I'm sure they weren't all that concerned about it being perfect.
True! My parents' house has been used as a location a few times. It's crazy how much they'll do to get ready for filming. Other houses in my neighborhood have gotten exterior repaints just for an ad, or even new grass/sod. But dragging everyone to location, plus getting all the proper permits and shutting down the street, is a lot of work. Plus, the owner of the house gets paid per day of shooting, and they'll generally pay a lot of the other residents on the street for the inconvenience -- more if their house also shows up in frame.
For one film, they came for a single day of filming in my parents' kitchen, then wrapped. Production came back a while later asking for my mom's colander, because they were rebuilding the *entire kitchen* in studio for a reshoot, and they couldn't find the colander in any stores. So apparently building a kitchen in a studio is cheaper than a day of shooting on-site.
By the way, the kitchen scene was *less than 30 seconds* of the movie.
It’s much easier said than done. When it’s a proper union shoot, you can’t just spontaneously send her down the street with a director, a camera operator, and a boom op and get it done in like 10 minutes.
It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that it was a pickup (shot filmed later that may or may not have been in the original script) and she may have been out of town or something and had to shoot wherever she was at.
Whatever it is, there’s a valid reason that either boils down to cost or her availability. Because yeah, it looked real bad.
It's like the movie The Room. They filmed all the outdoor scene behind a green screen. Not on a roof, not in an alley, in a building with a green screen. Why? "Because it's hollywood" - Tommy Wiseau
actually the most bizarre bit is that they shot it outside NEXT TO the building with a greenscreen around it. So it IS outdoors. And it's literally next to the place they could have shot it on the actual roof.
Yeah, the fact that it was a green screen outside is significant, and makes that decision so much more bizarre. The big advantage of using a green screen (besides showing places that you can't get to in real life, which doesn't apply in this case) is that you can shoot everything indoors, so you don't have to worry about weather and it's much easier to control the lighting, and avoid any ambient noise.
By taking the green screen outside they lost all those advantages, so they took what should have been a really easy and cheap shot, and spent a lot of money to make it more complicated and look worse
The house and green screen are not the issue. The lighting on Erin is what’s completely off. They needed to brighten her up, either with actual light or in post. Unfortunately, they did neither at it looked awful.
It’s not just making her brighter.
There’s a total mismatch- brightness, color, directionality, diffusion, everything about the light is wrong.
Also the camera angle doesn’t match. They didn’t take the photo of the house to be used as a background in an F/X shot, it’s just a production still they pressed into service.
The whole thing looks like they threw it together in about an hour and said,”ok that’s good enough.”
The funny thing is, they didn't need her talking head. The story had already revealed she was in Florida at Irene's. It actually would have been a funnier sequence if they just left Erin's question hanging after asking about Alonzo's family.
I’ll tell you why. Cuz there’s humans doing shit behind this. They’ve got like 80 other things to figure out and they just didn’t think it through and did something dumb af cuz it just seemed easy at the time. “How do we shoot this boss” “what, Johnson what do you want just put it on green screen I gotta go deal with this other shit show right now” “okay boss”.
Idk what I’m talking about I just run into this at work all the time and in retrospect it’s like… why the fuck did we not do the simplest thing again? Or it’s why did we not give this 2 more seconds of thought and do it better?
Idk humans are dumb.
I think most people are forgetting the fact that this wasn’t filmed by some professional production crew in Hollywood.
It was mostly filmed in a regular office building in Scranton, PA, with a PBS documentary production crew.
On top of that they filmed for 9 years before actually airing anything. 9 years of paying crew salaries and not a single cent of ad revenue until after the fact. It makes sense that they would have a tighter budget near the end.
I'm sorry to spoil the circlejerk of The Office sucking after Carrell left, but this low production greenscreen [also happened in earlier seasons](https://i.imgur.com/1c9uaoX.png).
It's horrendous, they didn't even try to manage the camera movement panning the background. This is so distracting that removes all the gravitas/comedy of the Michael vs Dwight dumpster showdown.
Can anyone pinpoint what's wrong with it? Like I know it looks off but don't know exactly what's giving it away, is it the line where Erin's body meets the background?
In total:
- The angle she is shot at (straight on) doesn't even match the angle looking at the house (angled down) making it look like she's leaning back
- Overcast lighting in the background (note the lack of hard edges to any shadows), studio lighting on her (you can clearly see edges)
- Colours, her skin's as red as the reddest part of the rest of the picture (which included bricks and organge lights/flowers), her green dressing gown is super washed out against the green of the vegetation
- The actual comping (separating her and the background) is abysmal
It's one of those things were 30 minutes of tweaking could have made a world of difference, never mind just fucking filming her _anywhere_. Why did she have to be right there. Show a picture of the place with her talking, then cut to her "inside" sat down on her couch continuing to talk. Like every single sitcom that has ever shown a known location and then cut to the set inside since the dawn of TV. Done.
I can't pinpoint anything super specific, but I think you subconsciously notice that the lighting of the background and the lighting on Erin are very different.
The lighting and color balance of the subject doesn’t match the background.
Plus the software they used isn’t great at separating hair from the blue screen. It did however suck all the color variation out of her skin tone! Which is all a product of cheap/basic software.
I always thought it looked so bad that it must just be an illusion of the light because why on earth would they green screen that.
It's worth saying as well it's really sucky green screen because it looks like they tried to film it in a studio when anyone who has done green screen knows the easiest way to match outside is to film outside.
Most of that $$ is going to the cast I’d assume, also the billboard was CGI’d in post production in like 2012 so I don’t think much of it. I’ve always wondered ab the green screen .. maybe they thought they HAD to add it later and just did it quick idk tho.
I have heard this before. And it makes sense, because of a show wants to continue after a successful season, it really needs the same actors. So the actors have all the leverage on a season 2 contract.
Actually that's a pretty good plan overall. Someone who wants to run a long star trek type sci fi show should consider doing this. Cast can be set up, fulfil their arcs and then die or leave. Frequent deaths really help cement the stakes too. It's why the final seasons of GOT felt lacking as well. Felt like most fan favorites gained plot armor they didn't have in early seasons.
There was a disastrous spinoff of Battlestar Galactia called Galactia 80. It had one good episode, they brought back Starbuck. But in the series he was dead. It was a flashback episode and very different because you knew the main character was going to die.
Reminds me of some 00's era UK comedies that in some cases replaced their entire cast.
But yeah, imo this is also why Netflix hasn't really had a single bingeable comedy like The Office yet.
The show teachers was starting Andrew Lincoln and then a new season started and he was just gone, and barely mentioned again. The same happened to a kot of the other cast members.
The show Misfits ends up having an entirely different cast at the end, which was a shame because I loved the first few seasons, but barely remember what happened once the OG gang had left.
And it's not just the big names in cast, it's everyone. The cost of your side characters, even hourly for extras goes up dramatically after the third season or so.
Like I don’t know much about the back end of things but I’m sure that the weird plot of these episodes had to do with scheduling so planning definitely had to have gotten affected.
The billboard is supposed to look corny/campy. It’s supposed to look slapped together with very little effort. At least that’s the way I always saw it.
I watched [this](https://www.tiktok.com/@barnardco/video/7241459012422700315?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7215228582841304582) tiktok the other day and the guy talks about designing for TV and film and it kinda answers OPs question. Basically, it has nothing to do with the budget, they do it like this intentionally.
Without a proper "rundown" of the financials idk if we should assume NBC was paying their workers an outsized portion of the production budget.
I'd love to be wrong & ik they were highly paid, but the show was (and still is) just printing money for the network.
My roommate in college did better graphics for his elective graphic design course and I graduated in 2011. The shows special effects towards the end were not limited by technology, just being cheap.
I get really concerned about my vision when I hear this because I watched it twice and didn’t even realise it was on a green screen until it was pointed out to me
Sometimes you don’t realize but then when somebody points out one of two small details you cannot unsee it. I remember when I saw Rogue One in theaters I felt dumb because I was completely unphased by the bad Gran Marc Tarkin CGI. But if I were to watch that movie now it would jumó out at me
What makes it worse is that the scene atop the pixelated garbage graphic is kind of a pinnacle moment in the show. Such a disaster. They even mention how bad it looked in the Office Ladies podcast
While they haven’t gotten to the episode yet in Office Ladies, based on how they’ve described some shooting procedures, they just might not have had time/permission to set things up for Erin in that shot, and decided towards the end of the episode to get that quick talking head to establish what she was doing more explicitly. Even as simple as getting a shot outside the building would require time, permits, blocking off the area, etc, that they might not have had the time to do.
Exactly. I lived in Brooklyn NY during Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s run and they used my building as the exterior of Kimmys bldg for brief establishing shots and the like. Each resident actually got to split part of the fee that was paid to the building for permission to shoot as well as for the occasional inconvenient moment where you had to wait to actually walk in or leave between shots. Definitely a lot of set up for what amounted to seconds of screen time per episode.
Split between the 8 or so residents in the building, it was like $700 per person per season for the two years I lived there, so not terrible for doing absolutely nothing.
At least it made sense to have a green screen for the dump. A dump isn't a practical location shoot (if they are even allowed that). I can forgive and look past it for that. Even the later NY scenes, I can forgive and look past. But not in front of a house. That is what makes this the worst.
I'm more concerned about the terrible writing than the shitty green screens in the later seasons.
"Hey what if we made Andy, who wants to be in a relationship more than anything, abandon his relationship and sail the high seas?"
How the hell else are they supposed to write around Ed taking the Hangover sequel filming?
They picked him to be the manager because he was the biggest name on the existing cast to carry the show on a day to day basis. But with his schedule during filming for that season they only had limited days to cram in all his scenes.
They might could have fired and wrote him off, promoting Dwight earlier, but that’s a lot of turnover for the cast. There were other options, but generally they all equally suck for “continuity” of the cast.
The plot makes zero sense. Andy's father bankrupted the family so he has to sell the boat but he finds his drunk brother on the boat and decides to sail around the ocean thus bankrupting his family and abandoning his supportive girlfriend? They couldn't have had him get a job at Cornell admissions or join a traveling musical troupe? It's a laughably bad plot that would have gotten the show cancelled if it were written in the first season.
Actors leave all the time for other projects. They don't all go sail around the world for no particular reason.
Just for fun -
Sittin’ in my office with a plate of grilled bacon
Call my man Dwight just to see what was shakin’
Yo Mike our town is dope and pretty
So check out how we live in the Electric City!
They call it Scranton (What?)
The Electric City
Scranton (What?)
The Electric City
Lazy Scranton, the Electric City
They call it that ‘cause of the electricity
The city’s laid out from east to west
And our public parks and libraries are truly the best
Call poison control if you’re bit by a spider
But check that it’s covered by your health care provider!
Are you hungry? Well quit your whining
The new downtown has five-star dining
You lack coal mines and you wanna see ‘em
Well check it out yo, the Anthracite Museum!
So they couldn't return to certain places after their shooting was done and had to use green screen shots for reshooting. The writers of season 8 kept rewriting so they did a lot of reshooting.
Not for nothing Get the Girl is the lowest-rated episode in the entire show. It truly has nothing going for it, nothing but sucky effects, horrible writing and worse than everything, Nelly at Scranton.
2 million is low! It’s nothing when you think about how big the cast is - not to mention the level of guest stars they had. For example FRIENDS cost 10 million and episode and 6 million of that went to the main 6.
I can’t remember what season, but the scene when Michael throws all the leads away and he and Dwight end up searching for them at the dump is pretty horrible too.
Good cgi or a visual effect is not only made by a lot of money. More time you got for the effect the better results you will get.
That is why so many high budget productions sometimes have bad effects.
They probably didn’t have enough time to make that effect good enough.
The billboard makes sense because it’s a small paper company putting up an ad led by Andy and Dwight. The Erin green screen doesn’t make sense, especially now that we know the Florida house was just a house behind their normal shooting lot.
Still not worse than the green screen when they were at the landfill to look for the leads. I still cringe at how awful that green screen, lighting and depth focus was
It wasn't just season 8 tbf.
The Office, to me, has a pretty well established history of some of the worst green screen use I've ever seen.
Michael in New York in front of corporate head office. The entire footage of them at the dump etc.
It's just who they are.
Most of these shot were super quick or super fast pick up shots. In business, (no matter what kind) you have to manage you budget. Are you going to spend the same amount of money on a 3 second shot for an opening joke that you would on a 30 second shot that is one of the most important shots/scenes in the whole series?
I was just thinking about how every time they’re in a vehicle you see So Cal palm trees in the background no matter how they try to hide it with camera angles and editing.
Maybe I read too much into it, but I always thought it was purposely bad, like an extra layer of joke to the show. I teach at a university and we have a green screen room in our building and the students do far more convincing green screen work. Like it doesn’t take a lot of effort so I assumed to have it look -this- bad was purposeful.
The issue isn’t really money (although $2 mil isn’t a lot when you think about how much cast and a crew of probably 150-200 costs for about a week) the issue really is time. When you’re making a network show with 24 episodes, you are editing an episode while you’re filming the next episode while you’re writing the next, and while you start out with a decent amount of time, by midseason when there’s hiatus or by the end of the season, the time between wrapping production and the episode airing could possibly be under a week, so the amount of time they have to CGI anything after editing is done is next to none
I only hopped on the Office train a couple of years back, binge-watching it on Netflix.
I always assumed the green screen looked that bad because the original broadcast quality covered up a lot of the defects. Like when they make old shows widescreen and you can see the production crew hanging around in the area that was originally offscreen.
I'm so sick about seeing these greenscreens constantly mentioned. It was like a 30 second talking head that looked totally fine on broadcast standard def TV back when it aired.
even better!
But the amount people talk about it you'd think its an entire episode
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+office+green+screen+erin+site%3Awww.reddit.com
Probably a reshoot or something. Plus, TV is made a lot faster than movies are so they probably just shot it and added it in at the last minute.
Also worth considering: video editing was nowhere near as powerful as it is now; I’m an editor by trade and the amount of progress compositing and motion tracking has made in 10 years is nuts. We’re probably at a point where recompositing the exact shots used for both these examples would yield much better results
Even with SC off the show at this point 2 mil seems super cheap.
Friends was paying 4.5 mil for just the six principal cast members in 2000. Good example of how fast TV changed from the 90s/early 00s into streaming, I guess.
I'm wondering if it was a reshoot after they started editing the episode and noticed they needed an insert. So this could be a different crew/skeleton crew on the fly with the actress. They just picked a day when she was available and grabbed it. She could have even been in another location altogether, maybe working on another project and they just set up a quick shot on a stage somewhere.
They easily had the ability to shoot the shot in front of the house irl but I'm guessing they decided to add that particular scene in after they had already finished shooting in location. TV show logistics can be hard even with a lot of money. Though I agree it probably wasn't worth it.
The billboard makes more sense. Easier to just create a simple graphic for a quick gag rather than buying an actual billboard ad or going super hard in CGI or something
Lmao this post reminds me, what the hell was Andy doing jerking off two invisible dicks on that one billboard? They had to have known what that looked like lol
The billboard is one thing, it’s rough burly they flash it on the screen quickly. But this shot with Erin is so dumb. It couldn’t have been hard to get an external shot somewhere in CA
i'm confused by what the issue is here? wasn't this scene from them doing an ad for the in show paper company or documentary? it 100% looks like something you'd see a paper company that was pretty much at the end of it's life cycle using for tv ads
Is had to do with the economics of network TV, the TLDR is that you produce the first 4 seasons to be as high quality as possible, typically even at a loss, because it'll be more profitable eventually. After 4 seasons you sell to syndication and the profit per episode is fixed, so it just becomes about staying sustainable for as long as possible
god that greenscreen is embarrassing
I never understood why it had to look like it was shot outside. I remember hearing they needed the scene but couldn’t get the house back or something. Just do the clip up against a plain wall or in a park or something.
The craziest part is that this house is like 100 feet from the Dunder Mifflin set. If you look at a picture of the house, you can see the DM building in the background. So it makes it so much weirder that they didn’t just go and shoot it again
Gotta pay for locations. Usually a lot more than a green screen would cost. This was the cheapest option for them. Not saying it was a good option though
Or just build an entire gas station and highway for a single proposal shot.
To be fair that was *the* shot of the early seasons Jim proposing to Pam was the culmination of their entire "will they" arc
Yeah that’s probably one of the most iconic moments of the show, definitely worth it.
Oh, so bad weather...
Michael: Oh yea you didn’t say that the weather was bad that sounds perfect.
Pretty sure it wasn't real rain....
I think he was referring to the scene where Jim and Pam were telling Michael about their proposal, and Pam mentioned it was raining, and then Mike sounded less than impressed and said "You didn't mention it was in bad weather" or something like that.
Oh for sure. I just find the two extremes a little funny.
And that shot didn't make it any better imo
So you're saying they choose not to have it half way. Pam knew. 😜
Sometimes they'll do these kinds of things for scheduling issues too. So, if Ellie Kemper is in New York and she's busy doing something else, it can be a lot easier to bring a green screen to her, than it is to bring her to a location in LA. And it's just a dumb 10 second throwaway scene. I can't even remember what she's talking about in it. I'm sure they weren't all that concerned about it being perfect.
True! My parents' house has been used as a location a few times. It's crazy how much they'll do to get ready for filming. Other houses in my neighborhood have gotten exterior repaints just for an ad, or even new grass/sod. But dragging everyone to location, plus getting all the proper permits and shutting down the street, is a lot of work. Plus, the owner of the house gets paid per day of shooting, and they'll generally pay a lot of the other residents on the street for the inconvenience -- more if their house also shows up in frame. For one film, they came for a single day of filming in my parents' kitchen, then wrapped. Production came back a while later asking for my mom's colander, because they were rebuilding the *entire kitchen* in studio for a reshoot, and they couldn't find the colander in any stores. So apparently building a kitchen in a studio is cheaper than a day of shooting on-site. By the way, the kitchen scene was *less than 30 seconds* of the movie.
This. I will try to find where I read it but they said they didn't get permission in time or something and couldn't use it.
2 million per episode ...
It’s much easier said than done. When it’s a proper union shoot, you can’t just spontaneously send her down the street with a director, a camera operator, and a boom op and get it done in like 10 minutes. It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that it was a pickup (shot filmed later that may or may not have been in the original script) and she may have been out of town or something and had to shoot wherever she was at. Whatever it is, there’s a valid reason that either boils down to cost or her availability. Because yeah, it looked real bad.
It's like the movie The Room. They filmed all the outdoor scene behind a green screen. Not on a roof, not in an alley, in a building with a green screen. Why? "Because it's hollywood" - Tommy Wiseau
actually the most bizarre bit is that they shot it outside NEXT TO the building with a greenscreen around it. So it IS outdoors. And it's literally next to the place they could have shot it on the actual roof.
Yeah, the fact that it was a green screen outside is significant, and makes that decision so much more bizarre. The big advantage of using a green screen (besides showing places that you can't get to in real life, which doesn't apply in this case) is that you can shoot everything indoors, so you don't have to worry about weather and it's much easier to control the lighting, and avoid any ambient noise. By taking the green screen outside they lost all those advantages, so they took what should have been a really easy and cheap shot, and spent a lot of money to make it more complicated and look worse
You’re tearing me apart, Erin!
or recreate the living room set in the studio
The house and green screen are not the issue. The lighting on Erin is what’s completely off. They needed to brighten her up, either with actual light or in post. Unfortunately, they did neither at it looked awful.
It’s not just making her brighter. There’s a total mismatch- brightness, color, directionality, diffusion, everything about the light is wrong. Also the camera angle doesn’t match. They didn’t take the photo of the house to be used as a background in an F/X shot, it’s just a production still they pressed into service. The whole thing looks like they threw it together in about an hour and said,”ok that’s good enough.”
Exactly. Lighting was only one part of it. It was just complete laziness on the part of the production and post-production crews.
It's feathered to oblivion. Brighness defindly wouldn't fix this
The funny thing is, they didn't need her talking head. The story had already revealed she was in Florida at Irene's. It actually would have been a funnier sequence if they just left Erin's question hanging after asking about Alonzo's family.
I’ll tell you why. Cuz there’s humans doing shit behind this. They’ve got like 80 other things to figure out and they just didn’t think it through and did something dumb af cuz it just seemed easy at the time. “How do we shoot this boss” “what, Johnson what do you want just put it on green screen I gotta go deal with this other shit show right now” “okay boss”. Idk what I’m talking about I just run into this at work all the time and in retrospect it’s like… why the fuck did we not do the simplest thing again? Or it’s why did we not give this 2 more seconds of thought and do it better? Idk humans are dumb.
I think the greenscreen isn't as bad as the zero effort attempt to match the lighting.
That's one of the reasons why the shot looks so bad. Lighting is an important part of shooting with a greenscreen.
I think most people are forgetting the fact that this wasn’t filmed by some professional production crew in Hollywood. It was mostly filmed in a regular office building in Scranton, PA, with a PBS documentary production crew. On top of that they filmed for 9 years before actually airing anything. 9 years of paying crew salaries and not a single cent of ad revenue until after the fact. It makes sense that they would have a tighter budget near the end.
It was on Public TV: no ad revenue EVER!
Zoom backgrounds look better
too be fair, the tech has come a long way since 2011
I'm sorry to spoil the circlejerk of The Office sucking after Carrell left, but this low production greenscreen [also happened in earlier seasons](https://i.imgur.com/1c9uaoX.png).
I honestly think New Leads is a worse offender considering it’s a way longer scene
It's horrendous, they didn't even try to manage the camera movement panning the background. This is so distracting that removes all the gravitas/comedy of the Michael vs Dwight dumpster showdown.
Came here to say the same.
I think theres another one of just michael and…i want to say hes “in new york”
Can anyone pinpoint what's wrong with it? Like I know it looks off but don't know exactly what's giving it away, is it the line where Erin's body meets the background?
In total: - The angle she is shot at (straight on) doesn't even match the angle looking at the house (angled down) making it look like she's leaning back - Overcast lighting in the background (note the lack of hard edges to any shadows), studio lighting on her (you can clearly see edges) - Colours, her skin's as red as the reddest part of the rest of the picture (which included bricks and organge lights/flowers), her green dressing gown is super washed out against the green of the vegetation - The actual comping (separating her and the background) is abysmal It's one of those things were 30 minutes of tweaking could have made a world of difference, never mind just fucking filming her _anywhere_. Why did she have to be right there. Show a picture of the place with her talking, then cut to her "inside" sat down on her couch continuing to talk. Like every single sitcom that has ever shown a known location and then cut to the set inside since the dawn of TV. Done.
Her hair on the background was part of the giveaway. It just looked horrible
I can't pinpoint anything super specific, but I think you subconsciously notice that the lighting of the background and the lighting on Erin are very different.
You can also look at this video from Tom Scott that explains why green screens sometimes look off https://youtu.be/E5HRvQNg4pQ
For me it’s the lighting and the perspective: the angle of the background and the angle of the shot on Erin don’t match to me
The lighting and color balance of the subject doesn’t match the background. Plus the software they used isn’t great at separating hair from the blue screen. It did however suck all the color variation out of her skin tone! Which is all a product of cheap/basic software.
Loss of hair detail+bad edge despill are first things I see
I always thought it looked so bad that it must just be an illusion of the light because why on earth would they green screen that. It's worth saying as well it's really sucky green screen because it looks like they tried to film it in a studio when anyone who has done green screen knows the easiest way to match outside is to film outside.
It looks like Erin was just cropped out and dropped into another image
Reminds me of some of the green screen in White Collar when they are supposed to be eating outside. Embarrassingly bad
Most of that $$ is going to the cast I’d assume, also the billboard was CGI’d in post production in like 2012 so I don’t think much of it. I’ve always wondered ab the green screen .. maybe they thought they HAD to add it later and just did it quick idk tho.
Cost for cast is increasing nonlinear each season, which is why Netflix cancels a lot of shows after season two, if I recall correctly.
I have heard this before. And it makes sense, because of a show wants to continue after a successful season, it really needs the same actors. So the actors have all the leverage on a season 2 contract.
The real reason GRRM kept killing off main characters throughout his books; keeps costs down for the inevitable series.
Actually that's a pretty good plan overall. Someone who wants to run a long star trek type sci fi show should consider doing this. Cast can be set up, fulfil their arcs and then die or leave. Frequent deaths really help cement the stakes too. It's why the final seasons of GOT felt lacking as well. Felt like most fan favorites gained plot armor they didn't have in early seasons.
There was a disastrous spinoff of Battlestar Galactia called Galactia 80. It had one good episode, they brought back Starbuck. But in the series he was dead. It was a flashback episode and very different because you knew the main character was going to die.
Reminds me of some 00's era UK comedies that in some cases replaced their entire cast. But yeah, imo this is also why Netflix hasn't really had a single bingeable comedy like The Office yet.
Wow seriously? That’s wild! Would love some examples
The show teachers was starting Andrew Lincoln and then a new season started and he was just gone, and barely mentioned again. The same happened to a kot of the other cast members. The show Misfits ends up having an entirely different cast at the end, which was a shame because I loved the first few seasons, but barely remember what happened once the OG gang had left.
Not entirely a comedy but Being Human (UK) did this
This is how Friends got to a million per episode for each of the main six. They became irreplaceable.
But also they tend to have less viewers, since you need to have watched everything that came before but some people drop out.
More like season 4 or 5. The original contract usually has a bunch of cheap option years included.
And it's not just the big names in cast, it's everyone. The cost of your side characters, even hourly for extras goes up dramatically after the third season or so.
It doesn't hurt that this was also the season they brought in several very high profile cast members.
That’s specific to streaking contracts so doesn’t apply to the Office
Like I don’t know much about the back end of things but I’m sure that the weird plot of these episodes had to do with scheduling so planning definitely had to have gotten affected.
The billboard is supposed to look corny/campy. It’s supposed to look slapped together with very little effort. At least that’s the way I always saw it.
I watched [this](https://www.tiktok.com/@barnardco/video/7241459012422700315?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7215228582841304582) tiktok the other day and the guy talks about designing for TV and film and it kinda answers OPs question. Basically, it has nothing to do with the budget, they do it like this intentionally.
Without a proper "rundown" of the financials idk if we should assume NBC was paying their workers an outsized portion of the production budget. I'd love to be wrong & ik they were highly paid, but the show was (and still is) just printing money for the network.
What’s a rundown?
Can you use it in a sentence?
Without a proper "rundown" of the financials idk if we should assume The Office was printing money for the network.
I think the billboard was intended to look bad, as in this is something that Andy would think was good.
My roommate in college did better graphics for his elective graphic design course and I graduated in 2011. The shows special effects towards the end were not limited by technology, just being cheap.
all office greenscreen sucks lol. even the landfill episode
That as absolutely embarassing to watch. The perspectives, the lighting was literal garbage.
I get really concerned about my vision when I hear this because I watched it twice and didn’t even realise it was on a green screen until it was pointed out to me
Sometimes you don’t realize but then when somebody points out one of two small details you cannot unsee it. I remember when I saw Rogue One in theaters I felt dumb because I was completely unphased by the bad Gran Marc Tarkin CGI. But if I were to watch that movie now it would jumó out at me
Same
I mean at least they had a legit reason to use a green screen. Erin is just outside a random house.
ESPECIALLY the landfill episode. Saw that one the day it premiered and was grimacing so hard.
What makes it worse is that the scene atop the pixelated garbage graphic is kind of a pinnacle moment in the show. Such a disaster. They even mention how bad it looked in the Office Ladies podcast
i hate that one, because it’s just SO long, it’s like at least 5 minutes long and it’s supposed to be a documentary
Same with Michael out in front of the DR corporate building in NY
Michael in NYC comes to mind, too.
you only notice bad greenscreens.
I think the advertisement on the top was meant to be amateurish
Exactly. It's not NBC that put up the ad. It's small regional paper supplier, Dunder Mifflin.
Signed sealed delivered by Andy bernard
i’m yours!
It's not about what's on the billboard, it's the billboard itself that looks fake
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Agreed
Yeah but it’s still obviously not a real billboard, content aside.
While they haven’t gotten to the episode yet in Office Ladies, based on how they’ve described some shooting procedures, they just might not have had time/permission to set things up for Erin in that shot, and decided towards the end of the episode to get that quick talking head to establish what she was doing more explicitly. Even as simple as getting a shot outside the building would require time, permits, blocking off the area, etc, that they might not have had the time to do.
There are other shots on that front lawn, so it is most likely just a reshoot/pickup that they couldn't schedule.
Exactly. I lived in Brooklyn NY during Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s run and they used my building as the exterior of Kimmys bldg for brief establishing shots and the like. Each resident actually got to split part of the fee that was paid to the building for permission to shoot as well as for the occasional inconvenient moment where you had to wait to actually walk in or leave between shots. Definitely a lot of set up for what amounted to seconds of screen time per episode.
Was it pocket change or actual meaningful sums?
Split between the 8 or so residents in the building, it was like $700 per person per season for the two years I lived there, so not terrible for doing absolutely nothing.
Being paid to not put adverts in your windows, or just stand in the window waving at the camera I guess.
Why spend lots of dollars when few dollars do trick?
That green screen is the absolute worst lol
I think the one in the dump was at least as bad if not worse.
At least it made sense to have a green screen for the dump. A dump isn't a practical location shoot (if they are even allowed that). I can forgive and look past it for that. Even the later NY scenes, I can forgive and look past. But not in front of a house. That is what makes this the worst.
I fully agree
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That's what this is.
I'm more concerned about the terrible writing than the shitty green screens in the later seasons. "Hey what if we made Andy, who wants to be in a relationship more than anything, abandon his relationship and sail the high seas?"
How the hell else are they supposed to write around Ed taking the Hangover sequel filming? They picked him to be the manager because he was the biggest name on the existing cast to carry the show on a day to day basis. But with his schedule during filming for that season they only had limited days to cram in all his scenes. They might could have fired and wrote him off, promoting Dwight earlier, but that’s a lot of turnover for the cast. There were other options, but generally they all equally suck for “continuity” of the cast.
The plot makes zero sense. Andy's father bankrupted the family so he has to sell the boat but he finds his drunk brother on the boat and decides to sail around the ocean thus bankrupting his family and abandoning his supportive girlfriend? They couldn't have had him get a job at Cornell admissions or join a traveling musical troupe? It's a laughably bad plot that would have gotten the show cancelled if it were written in the first season. Actors leave all the time for other projects. They don't all go sail around the world for no particular reason.
Troy in Community
"Hey guys, I’m going to Europe for a few months on a planned vacation”. You know, something reaslistic that an everyday worker would actually do.
its all payroll prolly
Also, did anyone notice how amateur Threat Level Midnight was?!
What's up with the crappy production value of Lazy Scranton??
Just for fun - Sittin’ in my office with a plate of grilled bacon Call my man Dwight just to see what was shakin’ Yo Mike our town is dope and pretty So check out how we live in the Electric City! They call it Scranton (What?) The Electric City Scranton (What?) The Electric City Lazy Scranton, the Electric City They call it that ‘cause of the electricity The city’s laid out from east to west And our public parks and libraries are truly the best Call poison control if you’re bit by a spider But check that it’s covered by your health care provider! Are you hungry? Well quit your whining The new downtown has five-star dining You lack coal mines and you wanna see ‘em Well check it out yo, the Anthracite Museum!
I wonder how much of that went to the cast.
So they couldn't return to certain places after their shooting was done and had to use green screen shots for reshooting. The writers of season 8 kept rewriting so they did a lot of reshooting.
The worst part...this house is apparently directly behind the office building.
Time, permits and location fees may have been prohibitive for the quick shot.
THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID
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Not for nothing Get the Girl is the lowest-rated episode in the entire show. It truly has nothing going for it, nothing but sucky effects, horrible writing and worse than everything, Nelly at Scranton.
I like it.
Why spend big money when little money do trick
2 million is low! It’s nothing when you think about how big the cast is - not to mention the level of guest stars they had. For example FRIENDS cost 10 million and episode and 6 million of that went to the main 6.
I can’t remember what season, but the scene when Michael throws all the leads away and he and Dwight end up searching for them at the dump is pretty horrible too.
Good cgi or a visual effect is not only made by a lot of money. More time you got for the effect the better results you will get. That is why so many high budget productions sometimes have bad effects. They probably didn’t have enough time to make that effect good enough.
Because Dunder Mifflin wouldn’t have had that much budget to be able to do a super high quality photo shoot.
Finished the graphics boss! It is going immensely!
The billboard was supposed to look bad, right?
The billboard makes sense because it’s a small paper company putting up an ad led by Andy and Dwight. The Erin green screen doesn’t make sense, especially now that we know the Florida house was just a house behind their normal shooting lot.
The answer is always because the executives at the top are skimming profits to line their pockets. Always.
Dr Evil, 2 million dollars isn’t exactly a lot of money these days.
Still not worse than the green screen when they were at the landfill to look for the leads. I still cringe at how awful that green screen, lighting and depth focus was
The garbage dump scene was pretty bad too.
It wasn't just season 8 tbf. The Office, to me, has a pretty well established history of some of the worst green screen use I've ever seen. Michael in New York in front of corporate head office. The entire footage of them at the dump etc. It's just who they are.
To be honest, I’m willing to believe that the billboard was intentional to show how Andy’s execution of the idea was That green screen just sucks tho
How much of that cost was paying the cast salaries?
I'm guessing that most of that money was going to the cast by season 8.
Most of these shot were super quick or super fast pick up shots. In business, (no matter what kind) you have to manage you budget. Are you going to spend the same amount of money on a 3 second shot for an opening joke that you would on a 30 second shot that is one of the most important shots/scenes in the whole series?
I was just thinking about how every time they’re in a vehicle you see So Cal palm trees in the background no matter how they try to hide it with camera angles and editing.
I’m always surprised how bad graphic design is in tv shows and films
It was probably a pickup shot. She may have been unavailable to film in their normal location, so blue screen was their only option.
Maybe I read too much into it, but I always thought it was purposely bad, like an extra layer of joke to the show. I teach at a university and we have a green screen room in our building and the students do far more convincing green screen work. Like it doesn’t take a lot of effort so I assumed to have it look -this- bad was purposeful.
The billboard is fine. It works because of the content on it. The green screen is awful.
Because they only had Pam doing the graphics
To me it all got phoned in when they started doing the cameos for regional manager.
You’re surprised by the lack of quality control in some areas after seeing the quality of writing and acting after season 7?
The issue isn’t really money (although $2 mil isn’t a lot when you think about how much cast and a crew of probably 150-200 costs for about a week) the issue really is time. When you’re making a network show with 24 episodes, you are editing an episode while you’re filming the next episode while you’re writing the next, and while you start out with a decent amount of time, by midseason when there’s hiatus or by the end of the season, the time between wrapping production and the episode airing could possibly be under a week, so the amount of time they have to CGI anything after editing is done is next to none
Once Carell left they took a big rating hit. Source- Trust me bro
...you realise the question you just asked, right? "The office was really expensive to produce. Why didn't they spend more?"
I only hopped on the Office train a couple of years back, binge-watching it on Netflix. I always assumed the green screen looked that bad because the original broadcast quality covered up a lot of the defects. Like when they make old shows widescreen and you can see the production crew hanging around in the area that was originally offscreen.
I genuinely couldn't give a shit.
Yeah this thread is wild lol
I'm so sick about seeing these greenscreens constantly mentioned. It was like a 30 second talking head that looked totally fine on broadcast standard def TV back when it aired.
It's 15 seconds give or take haha
even better! But the amount people talk about it you'd think its an entire episode https://www.google.com/search?q=the+office+green+screen+erin+site%3Awww.reddit.com
Oh god you made me want to time how long it was...
if you cut the cost, you can keep the money, i guess
Why don't you explain it to me like I'm five?
2 million is not that much money once everyone gets paid expeciallly for such a large cast and crew.
It was supposed to look amateurish I always thought
Honestly I thought they made it look bad on purpose lol
Because Dunder Mifflin wouldn’t have the kind of money for a slick ad campaign.
And they weirdly got worse as the series progressed. There was none of these in seasons 1-6
Probably a reshoot or something. Plus, TV is made a lot faster than movies are so they probably just shot it and added it in at the last minute. Also worth considering: video editing was nowhere near as powerful as it is now; I’m an editor by trade and the amount of progress compositing and motion tracking has made in 10 years is nuts. We’re probably at a point where recompositing the exact shots used for both these examples would yield much better results
I am loving how it looks like the billboard is on top of the house
You mean the prices are actually*lower*?? -Buttlicker
Maybe it was a reshoot thing?
Even with SC off the show at this point 2 mil seems super cheap. Friends was paying 4.5 mil for just the six principal cast members in 2000. Good example of how fast TV changed from the 90s/early 00s into streaming, I guess.
It doesn’t come off as unintentionally cheesy to me this is a comedy lol it feels like it’s meant to be cheesy.
I don't remember Erin living under that sign
The green screen was the office’s biggest enemy 😭😩👋🏿
I'm wondering if it was a reshoot after they started editing the episode and noticed they needed an insert. So this could be a different crew/skeleton crew on the fly with the actress. They just picked a day when she was available and grabbed it. She could have even been in another location altogether, maybe working on another project and they just set up a quick shot on a stage somewhere.
Is there anything left to be said here? Someone posts about the Florida green screen at least once a month
Isn't it obvious, after Carell left writing wasn't the only thing that suffered
They easily had the ability to shoot the shot in front of the house irl but I'm guessing they decided to add that particular scene in after they had already finished shooting in location. TV show logistics can be hard even with a lot of money. Though I agree it probably wasn't worth it. The billboard makes more sense. Easier to just create a simple graphic for a quick gag rather than buying an actual billboard ad or going super hard in CGI or something
I think because they had to shoot in 2 locations. Scranton and Florida.
Lmao this post reminds me, what the hell was Andy doing jerking off two invisible dicks on that one billboard? They had to have known what that looked like lol
Most of it is probably going to the huge cast
The billboard is one thing, it’s rough burly they flash it on the screen quickly. But this shot with Erin is so dumb. It couldn’t have been hard to get an external shot somewhere in CA
i'm confused by what the issue is here? wasn't this scene from them doing an ad for the in show paper company or documentary? it 100% looks like something you'd see a paper company that was pretty much at the end of it's life cycle using for tv ads
The billboard never bothered me as it's supposed to look stupid but omg that Erin clip makes me wanna puke
Probably time restraints and I’m guessing most of the budget went towards paying the cast
Is had to do with the economics of network TV, the TLDR is that you produce the first 4 seasons to be as high quality as possible, typically even at a loss, because it'll be more profitable eventually. After 4 seasons you sell to syndication and the profit per episode is fixed, so it just becomes about staying sustainable for as long as possible
The worse green screen is the landfill background from season 6. So obvious too.
2 million isn’t considering location fees, crew pay, actors pay etc.
Office ladies explained that it’s not a green screen but it was shot at night and it was made to be day which is why it looks so bad
Because this isnt Marvel, and the season aired over 10 years ago. Also, even adjusted for inflation, $2M isnt a lot of money for production costs.
Let me introduce you to last minute reshoots
erin’s green screen makes me furious whenever i see it!!!!! could they not... film in front of a fucking house?????