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Visual Effects

Visual Effects are Not the Answer

From the time I saw Star Wars, almost all of my favorite movies have been full of visual effects. My love of film and of visual effects developed simultaneously. I ultimately worked at Industrial Light & Magic for four years, even putting in some time on Star Wars itself, for better or worse. After that, I co-owned a visual effects company for ten years.

Visual effects can contribute enormously to a film. Few of us will ever forget the AT-AT attack on the rebel stronghold in The Empire Strikes Back, or the T-rex stepping out from the paddock in Jurassic Park.

But while visual effects can lend support to a movie, they are incapable of holding up its full weight on their own. I bet you can think of a few recent films that effectively demonstrate this.

With very few exceptions, visual effects cannot contribute something to a movie that isn’t there already.

They must augment and support the fundamental building blocks of film: story, performance, kinetic mise-en-scène, and even old-fashioned visual trickery.

Here are some examples of visual effects failing to solve filmmaking problems:

  • There’s no bad wire-fu that can be saved by painting out the wires. The wires are not the problem.
  • There’s no morph that tells a story better than a simple cross-dissolve. If it doesn’t work as a cross-dissolve, it won’t work as a morph.
  • I watched a team of incredibly talented compositors work for weeks to “improve” on a hacky Avid speed-change effect in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Ultimately, all the CGI and compositing was shelved in favor of a frame-by-frame copy of the Avid frame-blend effect.
  • In Jaws, a malfunctioning effect forced Spielberg to replace many planned shark appearances with clever filmmaking, resulting in one of the greatest and most influential movies of all time.

And today's example:

  • Your talking animal movie will not be any funnier with computer-generated mouths.

We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.

Red Giant Universe

From the Red Giant blog:

Red Giant Universe is a community that gives members access to fast and powerful free tools for editing, filmmaking, visual effects and motion design.

Every tool in the Universe library of effects and transitions is GPU-accelerated, both Mac and Windows compatible, and works across multiple host applications including: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X and Motion. The Universe library of tools is continuously growing—new effects and transitions are added regularly, and existing tools are updated often, based on user feedback.

A free subscription gets you access to tons of effects. A paid subscription ($10 per month, or $99 per year) gets you more. Don’t like subscriptions? Buy a perpetual license for $399.

If you want to be a part of this today, you can sign up for the public beta.

Inverse-disclaimer: Universe doesn’t fall within my Creative Director duties at Red Giant. I don’t have anything to do with it (yet). I’m just a huge fan. And speaking of being a huge fan, the directing/producing team of Seth Worley and Aharon Rabinowitz did such a rockin’ job on both this video and the teaser.

Cinefex Classic on Kickstarter

Cinefex needs your help to make something great.

The first issue of Cinefex I bought had Robocop on the cover. It was bagged and boarded at Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis, and I remember thinking it was expensive, and really fancy. I read it cover-to-cover, not understanding much of anything I was reading. When I got to the end, I read it again.

The Robocop article still stands out as one of my favorites. I went back and read it several more times, and with subsequent issues providing context, each new reading brought new understandings. It’s not only where I learned about zirc hits and methylcellulose, but also where I learned about Paul Verhoeven’s philosophy about violence in movies, and how an MPAA-ordered cut-down of the film’s more violent scenes had the unintended effect of transforming satirical, intentionally over-the-top violence into just plain violence. This wasn’t just an article about how some visual effects were accomplished. This was a juicy, practical essay on the filmmaking process.

Cinefex is still great, but nothing they’ve printed in recent years matches the infectious, inspirational glory of the back catalog. Here are some tidbits I remember to this day:

  • The elevator shaft that McClane throws the explosives down in Die Hard is a miniature, built in forced-perspective. This was, in part, to allow the model to be smaller—but the real, ingenious reason for the perspective trick was to make the explosion seem to accelerate up toward the camera.
  • When filming the motion-control miniature of the flying Delorean landing in the rain for Back to the Future II, the model was covered in vaseline, which was smoothed and re-stippled with a toothbrush on every frame, to simulate the wet car being pelted by raindrops.
  • Speaking of crazy stop-motion, in Robocop, ED–209’s machine-gun fire was animated by hand, as an in-camera effect. On each frame with gunfire, Tippet’s crew would shut off the set lighting and the rear projection, insert a tiny light bulb into the miniature gun barrel, hand-sculpt a cotton muzzle flash over the bulb, and re-expose the frame.

The deceptively minimal writing in these articles made these ideas and techniques seem not only understandable, but downright doable. Every issue would light a fire in my brain that could only be doused in my backyard, with a Super 8 camera, a cable release, and probably some unsafe household chemicals.

This was my education in visual effects. Cinefex is the reason I didn’t sound like an idiot when applying for film school, and for my first job.

When I landed my dream job at ILM, I thought maybe I’d “made it.” It was when I was first interviewed for a Cinefex article that I knew it was true.

Cinefex launched a great iPad version of their magazine last year, and each time I launch it, I see that floating wall of covers, and wish that I could have my dog-eared, worn-away back issues in this searchable, slick format.

And that’s exactly what they’re going to do—but they need our help.

Cinefex Classic is a Kickstarter campaign to bring the Cinefex back catalog to the iPad. There are ten days to go in the campaign, and they are close. Let’s get them to their goal so we can all have access to this amazing archive.

Update

on 2013-08-10 16:17 by Stu

They made it!