Special Effects

PHYSICAL EFFECTS

Physical effects are created by several types of professionals, the most celebrated of whom are stuntpeople. Such work demands both athleticism and skilled training, often in specialized areas that include work with cars, animals, or dangerous environments. These effects also require the work of specialized riggers and prop makers. The former provide tools such as wirework rigs for flying and falling, small ramps to make cars flip over, various types of safety harnesses and mats onto which stuntpeople can fall, and other similar devices. Prop makers are responsible for sugar-glass tableware, breakaway furniture, lightweight or rubber weapons, and similar items. Also involved in many stunts are specialists in the training and handling of animals ("wranglers"), pyrotechnics experts (responsible for fire effects), and set designers. Though many stunts are performed on location, others have to be staged on specially built sets, so that the design of the sets must accommodate the performance of the stunt while providing for the stuntperson's safety. The set designer must also create positions for cameras, since many stunts are "oncers," that is, actions that can be performed only once, either because a portion of the set has to be destroyed, or because the action is too risky to perform over and over. Thus multiple cameras are needed, each of which must have a good "eyeline" on the action while remaining hidden from the other cameras. Filming stunts often requires the use of different camera speeds from the standard twenty-four frames per second of normal cinematography. During the "Battle on the Ice" sequence in Alexander Nevsky (1938), for example, Edouard Tissé, Sergei Eisenstein's cameraman, shot at speeds reported at fourteen frames per second, giving the

effect of speeding up the action when replayed, but elsewhere over cranked the cameras to slow down smaller actions, in order to give the impression that the lightweight swords were in fact heavy battle weapons. Wounds can be simulated using gelatine sacs of fake blood or pumps, by firing gelatine caps or blood-soaked swabs at stuntpeople, or by exploding small charges ("squibs") of blood and meat painted into or under the performers' clothes (an effect extensively used in The Wild Bunch , 1969).

An example of a scene that is impossible to shoot occurs in The Perfect Storm (2000): an unrepeatable meteorological event, far too dangerous for filming even if it could be repeated, and mostly occurring in pitch darkness. To re-create the drama of the crew of one trawler, director Wolfgang Peterson's crew built a large tank containing an industrial gimbal on which was mounted a full-scale replica of the ship. As the boat was tossed in the tank and crew members directed high-pressure hoses onto the actors, massive shipping containers converted into water tanks dumped thousands of gallons of water onto the set. Shot in Steadicam for close-ups and against bluescreen (large sheets of a specific shade of blue which, used as a reference tone, can be removed from the image and replaced with other footage, giving the impression that the live action takes place in remote or imagined settings) for wide shots, the scene would be darkened in post-production, illuminated by occasional flashes of artificial lightning. Sometimes the impossibility of a shot is not physical but political or financial, and many films either use roughly similar buildings to emulate famous sites across the world, or build them in whole or in part as sets.

Likewise, miniature sets fall in the domain of the effects department. Not only do miniatures require detailed modeling: they create particular lighting demands. As every model train enthusiast knows, trees do not have the same structure as twigs. A specific challenge for miniatures is water, which acts very differently at smaller and larger scales, and is frequently mixed with milk and other liquids to break up the surface tension and to provide a better response to light. Miniature passes including water are often backed up with a pass for which the water is replaced with a reflective material like mylar to provide reflections of the surroundings, and two or more passes are then combined in postproduction to create the final effect. Miniature fire likewise acts differently from large fires, and must be tricked: a common device is to use two light bulbs of a suitable color near each other, flicking them on and off to produce the play of firelight. Other sets, such as the Minas Morgul miniature for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), use fluorescent paints, and have to be shot not only using standard key and fill lights but ultraviolet illumination to bring out the unnatural colors. Miniature passes are frequently shot using smoke to obscure defects in the model or to allow for the compositing of the miniature shot with other elements. Smoke too acts differently at different scales, and specialized fumes are used for this purpose.

The talismanic use of miniature photography is most associated with the careers of Willis H. O'Brien (1886–1962) and Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), especially the former's The Lost World (1927) and King Kong (1933), and the latter's Sinbad cycle. These films depend upon stop-motion cinematography, in which models built on articulated armatures, usually of light steel rods, are physically moved fractionally between frames in a miniature set. The result may look jerky to contemporary eyes but is widely cited as inspirational by a number of modern effects professionals. Particularly delightful is the constant ruffling of King Kong's fur as he is manhandled. During the 1970s and 1980s, advances in control systems made possible the rapid development of both human-operated puppets (for example, those from Jim Henson's [1936–1990] Creature Shop, which created the Muppets and many others), especially larger puppets requiring servo-motors to amplify the puppeteer's movements, and pure animatronic, robot-like puppets controlled remotely. A director who has used the technique widely is Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), whose Jaws (1975) is still frightening, and who developed convincing (and waterproof) dinosaur animatronics for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). Consistency of lighting, relation to the rest of the miniature set, and the establishment of believable spatial relations between elements in the shot are critical factors in developing effective stop-motion sequences. In recent miniature cinematography, the key advances have included the development of methods for moving the miniature camera, and the evolution of the snorkel lens, which, as its name suggests, uses reflection to bring the lens far closer to the miniature. Mobile shots of miniatures, such as shots of fighting vessels in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003) were not possible in earlier effects films, where issues of parallax and the matching of camera moves between miniature and live-action shoots were far more difficult.

The problem of matching camera moves was considerably eased with the arrival of motion control. A computer installed in proximity to the camera records its motions relative to the tripod, as well as laterally, in relation to the physical space in which it may be dollied or tracked. The recording is then used to drive either a second pass through the same space, or to replicate a shot initiated in a studio at a remote location, or to govern the movements of a virtual camera. Problems still arise with handheld or Steadicam shots and with the use of zoom lenses, since focal length is crucial for reproducing the shot. Conforming such difficult elements remains a highly skilled artisanal task.

Creating artificial space has evolved from the nineteenth-century melodramatic stage, where elaborate moving sets were used to create the illusion of larger vistas than the theater could hold. Developing from these theatrical traditions, Georges Méliès (1861–1938) first used hanging drops behind the action, and cut-out fore-grounds and sidings to create the illusion of depth in his Star Pictures productions of the early 1900s. Drops, however, lacked the light responses that a less "stagey" taste demanded (although many directors retained a taste for them, notably Federico Fellini in such later films as E la nave va [ And the Ship Sails On , 1983] and Il Casanova di Fellini [ Fellini's Casanova , 1976]). In their stead was developed the technique of matte painting, traditionally executed on glass sheets that could be placed in relation to live action in such a way the glass would appear to the camera as a natural continuation of the real space. One of the most celebrated examples of the technique was used to create Tara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Matte paintings are still used, often in the form of cycloramas ("cycs"), large semicircular drop curtains painted with pigments responsive to the lighting and film stock used for a shot, often composed of tiled photographs of real locations treated to add features, remove unwanted elements, or smooth over transitions from tile to tile. Cruder photocopied cycs are used to provide reflections of the virtual landscape onto real sets and actors.

In contemporary cinema, mattes are frequently replaced with blue- or greenscreen cycs against which the actors perform. Earlier versions of this technology filmed actors against an intensely lit blue or yellow backdrop through a beam-splitting prism inside the camera, which directed one stream of light to a strip that received only blue or yellow light, while the other received everything but, thus creating a perfect traveling matte. The colors of contemporary cycs are likewise reference colors that can be simply subtracted from the photographic plate (the term used to describe an element used in compositing different versions of a scene into a single image) and replaced with a digital matte, itself frequently composed of tiled photographic elements.

This technique is especially effective in cases where directors would previously have used rear projection to provide a moving matte effect. Rear projection demanded rigorous synchronization of the rear projector with the camera, and produced substantial difficulties in matching the focal length of the camera recording the actors with the depth of the scene rear-projected, an effect visible in a number of Alfred Hitchcock films, among them the driving scene in Notorious (1946). Typically, recent films use a combination of older and

newer effects. The jet-bike chase through the forest in Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983), for example, uses a traveling matte, in which an under cranked Steadicam race through a forest location was matched with a rotoscoped matte into which the actors, filmed against bluescreen, could be slotted onto the same strip of film without recourse to digital editing. Rotoscoping refers to the traditional animation technique of tracing the outlines of photographed action, frame by frame, to produce moving silhouettes, a technique now partly automated in digital editing software.

Other physical effects used since the very early days of cinema include filters, such as day-for-night, which cut down the ambient daylight to emulate moonlight, and dry-for-wet, especially useful when actors are required to produce emotional performances during underwater sequences. Scale effects such as the forced perspective used to produce the city square in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927) remain significant, as in the use of real lizards in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). Fantastic landscapes can be created by shooting small objects such as pebbles to make them appear the size of boulders, an effect used extensively in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), while its obverse appears in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958).

Equally theatrical in origin is the use of makeup, prosthetics, and wigs, though again with the tendency to seek credibility rather than emotional effect. However, much of the more flamboyant use of these techniques—from Fredric March's transformation scene in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Jim Carrey's turn in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), by way of John Carpenter's creature cycle of the 1980s and Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988)—tend to belong to the guignol tradition of the late nineteenth-century stage, a lineage that has inspired such masters of horror effects and makeup as Tom Savini (b. 1946) and Rob Bottin (b. 1959). Other stage-adapted techniques include the use of partial mirrors and reflections through glass plates held at a 45-degree angle to the camera, for such effects as ghosts or actors being consumed by flames that are actually several feet away but are reflected from the surface of the glass.

Other recent techniques deserving mention under the rubric of physical effects are bullet-time, motion capture, and digital scanning. Bullet-time, associated with effects supervisor John Gaeta's (b. 1965) work on The Matrix (1999), uses an array of still cameras timed by computer to construct an image of a single action viewed from multiple viewpoints in quick succession, giving the effect of freezing the action, while a single virtual camera travels around it. Motion capture, which revives techniques developed by the chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s, studs a performer's body or face with tiny reflectors. Instead of recording the visible light, motion capture uses infrared or other wavelengths to track the movement of these reflectors through three-dimensional space. The data so captured can then be applied to a digital double, or distorted to provide movements for an imaginary character. Digital scanning deploys a device rather like a barcode scanner on both objects and people to produce detailed three-dimensional geometry and surface maps, which can then be reworked in digital tools. Scans are used, for example, to scale up or down from models built by effects departments, rendering small sculptures as large edifices and vice versa. The technology is also used to scan actors emoting onto digital doubles engaged in impossible stunts rendered in digital spaces. Such scans were used, for example, to provide key frames for the animation of Gollum's face in some sequences of The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), and to map Ian McKellen's face onto a digitized Gandalf in the sequence showing his fall from the bridge of Khazad-Dûm in the same film.

Like motion control technology, motion capture ("mo-cap") and digital scanning share a relationship with physical reality which is as close as that of photography. Photography and cinematography rely on reflected light in the visible spectrum to construct two-dimensional images. Mo-cap and scanning take nonvisible light to construct three-dimensional images. Like the technique of taking molds from physical surfaces and applying them to miniatures and set construction, or using life-masks taken from performers as the basis for prosthetic makeup, the relationship with the surfaces of the sampled reality is in many instances more accurate than that gathered by traditional cinematography.

It is important to note that many effects are available for low-budget film production, and many make innovative use of them. In AMY! (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1979), what appears to be a full-sized chest of drawers reveals itself to be doll's house furniture. Double Indemnity Performed by the Japanese-American Toy Theatre of London is a 1970s video production enacted entirely by plastic wind-up toys. Spurts of fake blood are the hardy standby of many student films. Second-hand stores have provided props, costumes, and prosthetics for films as disparate as Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987) and The Lord of the Rings .