Special Effects: Crash Course Film Production #11 Video Lecture | Know more about Hollywood Film Industry: History, Production, and Criticism - Art & Craft

Sometimes it’s impractical -- or physically
impossible -- to get the shot you want.
Maybe the scene takes place on an imaginary
planet.
Maybe the film is about a magical creature.
Maybe the story requires action that would
be too dangerous to film in real life.
That’s when filmmakers turn to special effects
and special effects makeup.
If film is an illusion, special effects are
simply one more way to achieve or enhance
that illusion.
Whether it’s making Superman fly,
allowing Fred Astaire to dance on the ceiling,
or engineering a fight between Leonardo DiCaprio
and one angry bear,
vast teams of artists and craftspeople have
devoted their working lives to making the
impossible possible.
Let’s feast our eyes on the world of special
effects.
[Intro Music Plays]
We think of special effects as a recent development,
but it’s actually been around in some form
since the earliest days of cinema.
Beginning with the trick films of Georges
Méliès, filmmakers have been using things
like double exposure, matte painting, tinting,
and creative cuts to create magic on screen.
And they’re still at it!
James Cameron can take us to the bottom of
the sea – twice! – in The Abyss and Titanic.
Ridley Scott can immerse us in the neon-drenched
futuristic LA of Blade Runner.
Films like Zodiac and Far from the Madding
Crowd can use special effects to transport
us into the past.
And James Gunn can launch us into space with
a quip and a ship full of misfits in Guardians
of the Galaxy.
But special effects can also be used in much
more subtle ways.
Rather than draw attention to themselves,
these effects are meant to go undetected by
the audience.
Citizen Kane, for instance, is not much less
fabricated than the original Star Wars.
In fact, Orson Welles’ classic film was
a pioneer in visual effects,
optically printing massive exterior shots, and featuring sophisticated
old age makeup – complete with cinema’s
first use of contact lenses to give characters
cataracts.
More recently, dramas like 2010’s The Social
Network used computer-generated imagery, or
CGI, to complete city skylines and allow one
actor, Armie Hammer, to portray twins.
In Stephen Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning 2001
film Traffic, CGI was even used to create
tears on a character’s face to enhance their
emotion.
In fact, the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood
movies of the 21st century include at least
one shot that has been altered by special
effects technology.
Special effects can be broken down into several
main types, which can be used on their own,
or combined to produce an image that meets
the needs of the film.
Mechanical or Practical Effects are special
effects created on set.
These include physical character creation,
puppetry, animatronics, and more.
Think of the Cantina scene in the original
Star Wars film, before Lucas went in and
used computers to tinker with everything and
NO I’M STILL NOT OVER IT!
All those creatures were either puppets, animatronics,
or human actors wearing prosthetic makeup
or costumes.
Pyrotechnics, like fires or explosions, also
fall under practical effects, along with wind,
rain, mist, snow, and smoke.
In some cases, even running water constitutes
a practical effect.
Unless the film is being shot in an actual
location, someone has to plumb the set if
you want water to run from the faucet.
Optical Effects are created in the camera
as the film is being shot using optical instruments.
A lot of these techniques require extra equipment,
skills, and time, and nearly all of these
effects are now easier and faster to create
using computers.
Optical printing involves a combination of
the camera, a projector, and a special printer.
You begin by filming a live action scene,
matting out the section you want to replace.
This is called the “garbage matte.”
Then you film a shot that you’d like to
use in place of the matted section.
This is called a “plate”.
Finally, you combine the two pieces of film
in an optical printer, and, voilà: special effect!!!
Compositing is a technique now commonly called
“blue screen” or “green screen.”
Originally, black screens were used.
Actors would be filmed performing in front
of the screen, and then the black screen would
be replaced by a separately filmed background.
The problem was, dark shadows also appeared
black.
So any shadow on the actor’s clothing or
face would also be replaced by the background.
Not a good look.
Color cinematography and beam-splitting cameras
allowed filmmakers to expose selective colors
on two or three different negatives.
Suddenly, it was possible to use a specific
color for the screen, one that would be much
easier to separate from the actors or their
costumes.
The first major use blue screens in a feature
film was the 1940 Technicolor spectacle The
Thief of Bagdad, which won Oscars for both
Cinematography and Special Effects.
This technique continued to be refined until
blue screens were the norm into the 1970s
and ‘80s.
Green screens have become more common since
the advent of digital cinematography, because
green is less present in human skin and hair, and digital cameras are more sensitive to it.
Filmmakers use both blue and green today,
depending on the cameras being used and the
costumes worn by the characters.
For instance, you might not want to shoot
Superman in front of a blue screen, because
it could make him look like nothing but a
floating head, hands, boots, undies, a big
red “S” and a cape.
Again, not a good look.
Optical effects can also include scale models,
miniatures, and forced perspective props and sets.
These techniques allowed Peter Jackson to
turn full-sized human beings into hobbits
and then have them interact with human characters
on the same set.
Rotoscoping is an optical effect that involves
hand-tracing the subject of a shot, frame
by frame, so that it can be animated or more
meticulously matted into another shot.
Stop motion, sometimes called Claymation,
involves shooting a model one still frame
at a time, moving it slightly between each
shot.
The Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes
Back were created using this technique,
as well as animated films from Wallace and
Gromit
to The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Beginning in the 1970s, another weapon was
added to the special effects arsenal: computer-generated
imagery or “CGI.”
CGI covers everything from two-dimensional
animation to the fully realized 3D world of
something like Avatar.
Basic rule of thumb is: if the effect is made
on a computer, it’s some sort of CGI.
The first mainstream feature film to use CGI
was the original Westworld, directed by Michael
Crichton in 1973,
and its sequel Futureworld in 1976.
The effects themselves were quite simple – a
robot’s vision of our world, a 3D rendering
of a spinning hand – but they actually represented
an enormous step forward in the art and craft
of special effects.
Nine years later, the very first photorealistic
CGI character appeared, in the film Young
Sherlock Holmes, in which a stained glass
window shatters and the shards come back together
to form an animated, sword-wielding knight.
This moment paved the way for major advances
in CGI character creation…,
from fantasy creatures like Gollum or
Groot, to recognizably human figures like
Benjamin Button or
the young Princess Leia at the end of Rogue One.
Other aspects of CGI were equally revolutionary.
Digital compositing made combining various
images and image fields much quicker and easier.
Keyframing, meanwhile, lets animators draw
a character or object once, and then set points
– or “keyframes” – to indicate how
the image should move over a given amount
of time.
This saves artists from having to draw each
frame of an image separately.
Now, what if your canvas as a special effects
artist is actually a person?
Artists who specialize in special effects
makeup are trained in the same skills as
traditional hair and makeup artists, and then
develop more specialized expertise in creating
things like injuries, old age, deformities,
and the creation of monsters, aliens, and
other creatures.
One of the first filmmakers to excel at this
kind of special effects makeup was the actor
Lon Chaney, Sr. Nicknamed “The Man of a
Thousand Faces” for his ability to transform
into other characters,
he developed his own makeup techniques to
star in Silent Era horror classics like
1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and
Rupert Julian’s adaptation of The Phantom
of the Opera.
In the early days, major film studios had
their own “in house” effects teams.
Then during the 1960s and 70s, the studios
scaled back, and those teams set up their
own special effects houses which were then
hired by the studios for specific projects.
Today some of the most famous brand-names
in the business include Industrial Light and
Magic, founded by George Lucas in 1975;
Digital Domain, created in 1993 by filmmaker
James Cameron, along with master creature
creator Stan Winston and digital effects guru
Scott Ross;
and Peter Jackson’s WETA Digital, which
has created the effects-heavy drama Heavenly
Creatures, most of the Lord of the Rings saga,
and Avatar, among others.
Now, whether it’s in-house or not, the special
effects team is most often overseen by a visual
effects supervisor.
Their job is to ensure that the effects fit
the vision of the director and the needs of
the film, and that the effects are completed
on time and on budget.
In order to accomplish this, they assemble
and work with a variety of special effects
artists, from digital matte painters and compositors,
to roto artists who specialize in rotoscoping,
and lighting technical directors who work
as gaffers in the digital space, making sure
the direction, color, intensity, and mood
of the lighting matches the rest of the film.
Pre-vis – or pre-visualization – artists
help filmmakers anticipate what an effect
will look like when the film is complete,
and concept artists use illustrations to help
filmmakers design effects, creatures, and
environments.
Other artists specialize in rendering, animation,
weather design, enhancing explosions, combining
all the elements into a finished effect, and
on and on.
Special effects is an ever-expanding field,
as new technologies emerge to make innovative
effects possible.
If you’ve ever watched the credits on an
effects-heavy film, you know they list hundreds
of names under special effects.
All those artists spend their days working
to make the impossible possible, to wow us
with their imagery, and to enhance the illusion
of reality that is a film.
Today we talked about the earliest days of
special effects, from the silent trick films
of Georges Méliès to the subtle work in
Citizen Kane.
We broke down some of the the techniques used
to create special effects before computers
made it all so much faster and easier.
And we looked at a few of the biggest special
effects companies and a just some of the jobs
available to special effects artists working
in film today.
And next time, we'll talk about who puts all of these filmed elements together to make the actual movie.
The Editor.
Crash Course Film Production is produced in
association with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest shows, like
Physics Girl, The Art Assignment, and It's Okay to Be Smart.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these nice people and our
amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.