PRODUCTION DESIGNERS USE SPECIAL EFFECTS
With the explosive development of digital technology, many of today’s films rely on dazzling effects rather than compelling stories. In this chapter we will see an overview of effects developed from the beginnings of filmmaking, see what technology offers today, and hear from some production designers who use special effects. As visual consultant Bruce Block says, “It’s important that special effects be seamless – that they not draw attention to themselves, and that they support the story.”
Production designers can choose to use a special effect for several reasons: cost, safety, or fantasy effect. Colin Irwin, production designer on feature films and television series, reminds us about a safety consideration.
On Alien Nation we had a final climactic effect that took place in a steel mill. The director wanted the actors on a giant crane way up in the air. There were lots of holes to fall through—a dangerous situation. To solve the problem, we took still shots of the crane and went onto the soundstage with a blue backing and floor and matted the actors into the still shot with optical and lab work.
For a fantasy film, Irwin designed a new world: “I was working with an illustrator doing mountains and we turned the sketch upside down as a background for a platform we built for the actors, a cost-effective solution for a fantasy situation.”
Special effects are not a contemporary phenomenon. Many early filmmakers began experimenting with them. In 1896, Frenchman George Méliés saw that film manipulation could present astonishing results. He made a short film featuring a woman who was there on the screen one minute and gone the next! Méliés first photographed the woman in the room setting, stopped the camera, had the woman leave, and started the camera again on the empty room. When he processed and projected the film, voila! – the woman was there and then she wasn’t. Of course, he called his film The Disappearing Woman.
Frame by Frame
Filmmakers found that they could photograph objects one frame at a time and by moving the subject slightly between each frame, give the appearance of continuous movement. King Kong, the 1933 film featuring the famous giant gorilla, used this technique for dramatic effect by single-framing doll-size gorilla and human figures in exterior miniature sets and in front of pictures projected through a translucent background. A later version of the same story used large mechanically operated gorilla figures, and another gorilla film is in production with no physical models at all – the gorilla is computer generated.
Overcranking and Undercranking
To give the effect of speeded-up and slowed-down action, the operator can run the film slower or faster through the camera. Older films, shot at silent speed, have a comic appearance because the film moves faster through sound speed projectors. Special lenses and filters offer another means of altering straight photography.
¼” scale model made of plastic snow and model supplies
Miniature settings have important advantages – lower production costs and control over weather and lighting – compared to building a full-size set or shooting on location. Skillfully made and photographed miniature settings are undetectable by most audiences. By carefully calculating perspective and dimensions, effects artists can also create hanging miniatures – portions of the upper parts of sets – which they place in front of the camera.
Glass shots, first used in 1907, offer another scene replacement technique. By carefully determining the desired area to be covered, an effects artist paints the added scenic material on a large sheet of glass, which is placed in front of the camera.
Matte painters paint a portion of a scene, which is photographed and laboratory-processed, to replace a portion of another film scene—similar to a glass shot except that two pieces of film create the effect. Matte painting techniques can save a great deal of production money by eliminating the need to construct large pieces of scenery.
Production consultant Bruce Block compares the traditional matte painting art to the way the technique is used today:
Every studio had their own matte painting department and just regular movies had a half dozen matte paintings in them just to change the sky or add the top of a building or room. The true craft of matte painting is on the endangered species list. Now matte painting is primarily done on the computer and there are no apprentice painters sitting next to you. The painters coming up now are coming up through computers instead of the fine arts and they don’t really understand light or volume or what a shadow is or how to plot multiple-point perspective—hard to plot on a computer. Most of the really good matte painters working today actually paint the scene on glass or masonite and then put it in the computer.
Optical printers offer a wealth of effects to filmmakers. These devices combine projector and camera so that the operator can transfer different projected images onto one piece of film to produce dissolves, fades, and superimposition of one image over another. The optical printer can replace the glass-shot technique by combining separately photographed portions of scenes.
In common use during the 1930s and 1940s, backgrounds produced by projected images through translucent screens offered many advantages to the major studio system. A producer could send a second photographic unit anywhere in the world to shoot background footage. Doubles for the actors could appear, as long as they wore similar costumes and were not seen at a recognizable distance. Back at the studio, directors used the background footage behind actors walking, riding horses, in cars, or gazing at the view. Studios kept libraries of background film and used these images over and over again.
Bill Hansard, CEO and Operational Director of Hansard Enterprises, Inc. (Culver City, CA), has seen the advantages of rear projection during production of over 300 feature films, 500 television shows, and 5,000 commercials:
With rear projection you have the advantage of the actors and crew seeing what is beside them, behind them, or around them. The actors can interact naturally with what is in the background. The crew can do interactive lighting with confidence since they can also see the background. Most importantly, you see in the dailies [next-day film viewing] on the large screen exactly what the scene will look like.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ushered in a new era of special effects. The film used front projection, computer-controlled camera movement, and extensive use of blue- and green-screen techniques.
Blue and Green Screens
Although rear projection of images through translucent screens enhances many films and saves location shooting costs, the vistas it can present are limited to the size of the projection screen. Blue- and green-screen effects require the actors to move in a void without the aid of surrounding scenery, but this method offers the possibility of larger vistas and sophisticated laboratory processing. The actors’ and objects’ images are then combined in the laboratory with the background. Bill Hansard describes some of the disadvantages:
Green and blue screens can sometimes be a false economy. When you are on stage, the blue and green screens go up rather easily, get lit, and you shoot the scene with your full production crew and people or objects in front of the screens. It may have been simple enough to shoot, but it doesn’t end there (as with rear projection). What most production companies don’t always think about or understand are all of the steps the film has to go through in postproduction. The negative has to be scanned into a digital source, composited with the background, rendered, and finally output back to a new negative. All of this is additional cost and extra time. For every blue- or green-screen shot the process is the same. Additional shots mean more time and more cost in postproduction when the meter is running.
The film Blues Brothers 2000 has many special effects that used models, green screen, and computer compositing. Available Light Postproduction Effects Supervisor John Van Vliet and staff created the finished effect shown in Color Plate 1. The script required the effect of Valkyrie-like ghost riders galloping through clouds over a live action rock concert stage and audience.
In front of a green background and floor, green-clothed puppeteers manipulated the skeletonized horses and riders (see Color Plate 1).
A separate shot captured the fire-breathing effect produced by flames in front of a black background (see Color Plate 2).
A puppeteer and a puppet horse figure (see Color Plate 3).
Artists and technicians then computer-composited the final effect seen in Color Plate 4.
A specialized projector sends the background image on the same axis as the camera lens onto a highly reflective screen behind the actors or objects. Light levels on the subjects wash out the background image projected on them.
THE DIGITAL PRESENT AND FUTURE
As we have seen, today’s production designers have a wealth of techniques at their disposal, compared to the early designers’ dependence on paper, pencil, hammer, nails, and paint. Computer technology already produces major portions of feature films and promises to become even more important in the future. If we can produce digital dinosaurs and gorillas today, are digital actors next?
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In the next chapter we will leave the digital effects world and see basic lighting instruments used by lighting directors and cinematog-raphers to illuminate the production designers’ work.