How'd they do it? Movie Magic.

Glo-Boy

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Hey. I'm finishing school in a couple of months with a BFA in visual effects. My industry experience is pretty much nothing, but my knowledge of visual effects methods is pretty expansive. So in the spirit of relieving the terrible itch on your head you get when you see a great effect on screen, I'm here to tell you how it's done.

I had the idea to create with this thread after I heard someone say "Oh, well it's all done with computers" and it's not. Computers may be platforms for the artists to create the effects, but the truth is that real people put a lot of hard work into this stuff and everything is done by hand. Not to mention, it's pretty interesting... to me at least.

So fire away if you want. I might not be able to say exactly how a particular scene was done, as in what software was used, but I can tell you the common technique used for that type of effect.
 
how they do when the movie is ambiented in a another decade like the 30 and shoot scenes in big streets whti tons of people and all?do they build huge scenarios or use other methods?

for example if the tim burton batman movie I noted the scenario of gotham city looked huge
 
how they do when the movie is ambiented in a another decade like the 30 and shoot scenes in big streets whti tons of people and all?do they build huge scenarios or use other methods?

for example if the tim burton batman movie I noted the scenario of gotham city looked huge

There's a number of different ways you can do it. That batman example you used, that probably would've been achieved by building a miniature set of Gotham City and passing the camera through that said on a wire or a jib arm (crane). Something like that.

But if you're talking about big scenes like in King Kong, where Jack Black and Colin Hank are walking through the city of New York in the 1920's/30's/whatever, that would've been achieved by building a set with the art style of that period, only instead of building several blocks of a city on this one set, they would simply build one street for all the actors to walk through, and at the end of the set they'd place a giant green or blue screen and digitally add in the city in the background.
 
That's if you're lucky. 3D is more generally used for large environments nowadays. Another answer though could be what's called digital matte painting.

This is the process of painting a background or a set extension for whatever is on the screen. For a scene in King Kong where the camera is just looking around (panning, tilting) there is no visible parallax effect, so a matte painting can take the place of 3D and often look better too.
 
Hey, Glo-Boy - good to see another 3D guru on here. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you but I finished school last year, looking for a job now (hopefully with a studio that uses Maya).
 
How about the lightsabers and lasers in the original Star Wars, I know they were "painted" on each frame but how they did achieve that glow? you can't just "paint" glow can you? :?
 
yeah how they do all the effects in the first star wars if computers didnt existed?right?
 
StardogChampion - It very well could be 3D as I haven't seen this movie and I can't be sure. However, my best guess is that for these angles, they set up the camera on a motion control crane. This type of crane is programmed with a certain movement specified by the operators.

They'll shoot a clean plate of the room (no actors/props) and a plate of Jet-Li and a couple of stunt men that he interacts with (like the guy he throws around.) When he hits someone or kicks them off screen, that's when they do the switch to the footage of stunt guys on wires/3D guys flying around.

These plates of footage are layered together in compositing software and using rotoscoping techniques, they can add shadows, more motion blur, sparks, even replace faces of stunt guys if necessary.

Gunner and RJMC

As I just mentioned, rotoscoping is a popular method for all sorts of visual effects. The best way to think of it is like the selection marquis in Photoshop, only animated. For the first star wars, they used reflective tape and post-process filtering to achieve the effect. It left a lot to be desired, or so thought george lucas, so for the next two movies they rotoscoped the light sabers by hand in addition to the reflective tape. The light reflected on the actors themselves were done on set, but the actual glowing light saber itself was easily done through rotoscoping.

For the space scenes with the ships, they shot many many different plates. Between 30 and 50 on average of different things, such as the death star, maybe one for some tie fighters, one for the x-wing right up close, etc. Each of these model ships were shot on top of an alpha layer (generally black.) They then actually lined up these frames in a large machine that acted a bit like a projector (can't remember the name of it) and through optical blending, they could cut out the alpha channel on each layer of film until it all looked good together. If just one frame was off, they had to reshoot it all over again. A lot of the footage you see in those scenes was film of film of film. So much work was involved, it's incredible.


Space Farm What did you do in school? Like what was your major? Where did you go?
 
Space Farm What did you do in school? Like what was your major? Where did you go?

I went to a private institution here in Australia, I did a two year, Advanced Diploma in Visual effects for film. I loved every moment of it.

Interesting about that Star Wars too, nowadays they'd just have to re-render one single frame, not everything all over again - imagine how expensive that would've been for them...
 
To answer the Star Wars light saber question; quotes from Mark Hamill and George Lucas:

Hamill:
"The effect of the light saber was basically a rotating pole that had movie screen material applied to it, so that it would reflect the light source back at many times the intensity. The problem was that if you moved in or out of a certain area, it went from glowing and looking great to just a rotating pole."

George Lucas:
"We would rotate it with reflective tape so that it would flash and would create light on the actors and all that. That never really worked. As soon as they hit each other, they broke the light sabers. So then we'd just use the sticks with the reflective material on it. As we moved on, we actually got more proficient on sword fighting. We then used swords that hadn't the reflective material on it, but we toned down the fact that we had to shoot the light through the lens and a lot of other things to try to make it -so we could be more, uh, facile in the way we shot these fights."

Hamill:
" I thought it would just be handled and they'd put in cartoon blades later. But if you were sword fighting you wouldn't know when to stop your hand. You needed something to strike."

Lucas:
"Every laser sword really is part real and part animated. We need the real pole to tell us where the sword blade is. And sometimes we use a short blade because they're fighting so close that they would hit the set and things like that. And sometimes we'd use no blade, 'cause the blade would turn on in the shot, or, what they were doing was so complicated that we couldn't do it with swords themselves. And then we would add the sword in later. But that takes a lot of careful tracking to figure out where the blade would be."

Later on in Empire strike back the technology was more advanced and they would not even bother with alot of the sticks, but they still had short shafts to have some form to fight with.
 
I find it that to achieve the most realistic effects they should combine live action, miniatures and CGI. Nowadays I've seen that they use mostly just CGI. Sure it looks good but you can tell straight away what is CG and what is not.

Oh and Glo-Boy I have a question in the film Memoirs of an Invisible Man how did they make those effects where the main character had makeup on and the other parts of his face were invisible, or those scenes were you could see only the clothes walking around?
 
You're right about the 3d stuff, Remus. There is way too much of it used inappropriately. It can and should be used for either drastic situations, or for little things like the hero shot of our main character with the Kodak moment flock of birds behind her.

As for the invisible man, I'm not sure how different things were in 1992, but I would imagine that they had blue face-paint and keyed it out the same way they'd key out a bluescreen.
 
How do the cars and trucks fall out of the sky in twister and independence day and many othermoves? Is there a big crane that drops them or throws them somehow?
 
The cars are suspended by cranes and dropped to their precise locations. Before the shoot, they take clean plate shots (clips with no actors, props, or anything else.) Then they take the footage of the cars being dropped, and the clean plate and they load it into compositing software. Then, they digitally erase the cranes/wires using the clean plate as the image information.

It's kinda like in photoshop, you have a picture of a bare room, and the exact same picture, only you've put a chair in it. For the floating chair effect, you'd erase the legs of the chair on the top layer, while the clean plate on the bottom shows through.


They usually won't use model cars, though. This is because the crumpling patterns of the metal would give away the fact that they're tiny and stupid. So in most cases, they just use real cars. However, 3D was probably used here and there in both Twister and ID4, but probably real cars for the most part.

Also, if there are actors in the scenes, they'll be shot on a separate plate and rotoscoped later.
 
How about those cellphone/car commercials where the camera seamlessly moves in and out of laptops, TV screens, windows, buildings, etc.

Is it just a bunch of Adobe Premiere cut+paste trickery?
 
Yeah it's footage of the car driving to begin with. Then they begin another shot of the computer moniter/window/etc and pull away. The moniter is usually blank with some tracking markers (little Xs of tape) and the footage of the car is tracked onto the moniter using some actions called corner pinning and matchmoving. Pretty much what you expected.

Awwww, that's no fun. Couldn't they be dropping cars on real actors instead?

God how I wish. Actually, I had an idea and wrote a little short story about it in like 8th grade where a film company used death row inmates as stunt doubles for movies and just actually threw them off buildings or shot them with miniguns or whatever.
 
God how I wish. Actually, I had an idea and wrote a little short story about it in like 8th grade where a film company used death row inmates as stunt doubles for movies and just actually threw them off buildings or shot them with miniguns or whatever.

That's a pretty awesome idea! Its like Cube meets The Truman Show.
 
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