Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Behind-The-Scenes Videos Show How Iconic Movie Special Effects Were Made
io9.com: When you're watching a movie, it's easy to get lost in the magic and not think too hard about how King Kong climbed the Empire State Building, how Jurassic Park's T-Rex roared to life, or how Charlton Heston encountered the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes — but these videos reveal all those movie secrets.
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The article points out at the very beginning that most people aren’t paying attention to how things work behind the scenes of a film. However, this is something that has always fascinated me. One of the things I love about film is how well the special effects are integrated into the filmmaking process, which is why it is possible to get lost in the magic without thinking about how they did it. The clip that I was most struck by was of the making of the Baron, for Dune in 1989. He describes the three different rigs they needed for those shots, and how they would switch rigs with the different shots to allow for the different angle needs and the difficulties presented by the set. None of those shots were done with green screen- so the filmmaker and the special effects artist had to think very carefully about where the shots were cut so that the machinery was not seen. The first rig from above cuts to a shot from below in which his feet aren’t pictured, so he can be standing on a platform for that part. It was a lesson in collaboration, and used to great effect.
We live in a time where every big budget special effect is highly computer generated so it’s exciting to see how everything was done back in the good old days before such technology even existed. Stop motion, scale models, blue screens, glass painted panels, these were the original tricks of perception that made those older movies as awe inspiring as they are. I think the special effects in those days were perhaps even more rewarding than they are now because when they were successful we not only clamored at how authentic they looked but also had an appreciation for just how long it must have taken to capture that effect, or even better, were completely stumped as to how that moment was even captured. Now its all computerized models that are rendered then manipulated, which although is still very impressive, it is far less exciting than the way special effects were executed back then.
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