Friday, August 29, 2014
It's all in the details: these miniatures changed movies
The Verge: Perhaps it’s having grown up in the ’80s and a hearty dose of nostalgia in the face of overwrought visual effects in modern movies, but there’s something indescribably powerful about the special effects in films like Blade Runner, Alien, and Dark City. It was an era before CG took over, a time when nearly a century of practical special effects culminated in whole armies of craft workers and artists that knew how to bring the audience to another world or dimension.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Miniatures are pretty dang awesome. I think building things in scale to use for movie purposes is a skill that is disappearing. We all have seen the movies that the CG is really bad and everything looks funny, like clay, or just BAD. I have had very limited experience in the scale building world but what I have had was a lot of fun. I do think that I would enjoy building model, largely because you get the build your imagination. That is so much fun to build and to explore.
Also the use of perception and depth from the DUNE video was amazing. Being able to understand and to line up model sizes to real life size is a skill that I am quite envious of. That could be used for the theatre but just needs to used carefully. Hopefully some future scenic designer and I will get to work together to make some sweet deceptive scenery.
See? This is why the quality of movies effects are going down. Everything nowadays is animated when they could just make scale models of te same thing. It always seemed so much more real when it was actually real (but miniture). Maybe this is why Tim Burton always has such good movies. Even though his figures are clay, they are every bit real. Each frame is another photo that he took. Each movement is a slight adjustment of a figure. Imagine if he started to animate those things instead. Think of how fake they would look. It is important to put the quality before the how much money you can save.
K clark, correct me if I'm wrong, but are you suggesting that making a movie with Stop-Motion Animation (what you described) is faster and more efficient that the same movie in CGI? Because I don't know how true that maybe.
In fact, Tim Burton himself has begun to move away from stop motion and towards CGI. Since 1993, only 3-1/2" have been stop motion (James and the Giant Peach was both).
I agree with you that movies in which every hair and thread on a character's body is aligned and straightened by a skilled artisan are visually much more striking that cgi films. But making a stop motion film requires hundreds upon thousands of hours of extra work.
Take a look at South Park. Their pilot episode was made via stop motion, and it took them 3 months. for only 20 minutes of video.
Nowadays the crew at South Park Studios is able to make an entire episode in only 6 days.
#sixdaystoair
So while the aesthetic of stop motion movies and cgi is clearly drastically different, it is unjust to assume that a film or project is lower in quality just because they image was created by computer hands and not human.
This is so exciting! I love seeing how special effects were done before CGI! There is something so real and engaging about seeing a movie and knowing that the models and sets were built by hand. Don't get me wrong, I love the technology that is used in films and it allows film makers to create worlds that we could have never imagined 30 years ago, but I still find joy in the artistry that goes into making things by hand. I too love stop motion animation and respect the endless amounts of work that goes into creating hand made worlds, but in our modern age of entertainment, these movies are now simply novelties. I guess there are specific needs and uses for both forms of filmmaking. I love stop motion animation because my interest in model making and scale models, but it is a dying form of entertainment that is being overtaken by 3D animation and CGI. This video was a wonderful look into how things used to be made and how much everything has changed in such a short amount of time.
I remember being absolutely fascinated (and I still am) by the huge miniature scale model of Hogwarts from the special features on the DVDs. While CGI is getting bigger and better, there's really no substitute for the artistry that comes from working with scale models. Try as you might, there are still things that you can only achieve with scale models that you just can't recreate with CGI just yet. Even though the world of special effects is definitely moving into a more tech-savvy era, I don't think that the artistic nature of the special effects "artist" should fall to the wayside. I feel like every special effects artist should have some expertise with scale model making in their back pocket and not have to fully rely on a computer to do their work for them.
This is awesome. My main turn-off to film design has always been the fact that nothing is done live. There are no grand feats of creativity and problem solving when you can rely on animation and digital special effects. These films, however, prove me wrong. Although film may now be dominated by computer effects, before that technology was available the "movie magic" that we say on the screen took loads of creativity and problem solving, and to me that is what creates the feeling of magic. It was awesome to see that the newer batman movie used a miniature. It gets me thinking about exploring film and seeing if miniatures can be brought back into the industry!
Scale models are the absolute best. They remind me of some of the best science fiction films like Alien, The Fifth Element, and Blade Runner. The thing that make scale models so appealing to me is the way that they bring the world of the film into a tangible existence. To be able to walk through the streets of 2019’s L.A. in Blade Runner is absolutely incredible. It makes me feel better just knowing that someone was able to do that, even if it was much smaller than the true scale of what it would be in real life. One of my favorite models made for The Fifth Element are the suits for the Mondoshawans. But they have a tragic end to their story. The giant, pig-like, golden, art-deco suits were made for the Fifth Element and after filming they were destroyed because of a fear of potential copyright issues. I cannot even fathom how the people who made them felt. Even when the director Luc Besson asked if he could keep just one he was told no.
Post a Comment