Movie special effects
December 30, 2021 1:30 PM   Subscribe

A couple short videos on movie special effects: The Death of Green Screen, by Mr. Sunday Movies, covers the history of special effects from King Kong to The Mandalorian. Thomas Flight explains Why Dune's Visual Effects Feel So Different.
posted by russilwvong (11 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
These are entirely in my wheelhouse and I'm enjoying them a lot. Thank you for posting!
posted by hippybear at 1:52 PM on December 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


I've only watched the Thomas Flight one—one Dune's effects—so far but it was very interesting. And, for once, his ad sponsor was of interest to me as well.

The kind of things he is looking at—reflections in glass, light on actors' faces, the movement of sand—reminds me of watching the extras on my DVD of Master & Commander. One thing that stuck with me was one of the effects people talking about using models for ships being tricky because, even though they don't necessarily understand why it looks wrong to them, audiences can see that, for instance, the drops of water are too big. So one of the things they tried to do was figure out how to make the water drops finer. Now, I see it all the time in TV shows and movies, the wrong scale of water when a scene is done with models. (Developing an eye is always a mixed bag—on the one hand, it can enhance your pleasure. On the other hand, it can reduce it.)

I haven't seen Dune yet, but I plan to, and that video make me want to even more. I don't care whether it's "good" or "bad" in certain ways—I think it will be interesting.
posted by Well I never at 2:11 PM on December 30, 2021 [5 favorites]


Mr. Sunday Movies is good at explaining stuff, but he doesn’t really know much about actual film production. Read the comment from Andreas Karlsson.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:21 PM on December 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


here is that comment (with a two paragraph breaks inserted):

Professional VFX artist here. I actually worked on a few of those movies you show clips from, and yes, you are getting all the basics more or less correct. Rear projection is a classic film-making technique, and the modern Virtual Production sets with LED screens are a the latest incarnations of this. And The Mandalorian sure made excellent use of it. But the main issue with this technology (and the main reason green screens will still be around for the foreseeable future) is something you mention in passing without perhaps realizing its importance: To be able to have the backgrounds available on set, they will have to be created before the shoot.

This is not how your typical Hollywood film is made. The visual effects are made by a third-party vendor in post production, after the film has been shot and a decent cut has been assembled. That is pretty much they way it has been done for more than 100 years, and it's not likely to change soon. The only technologies that are adopted quickly are those that allow the filmmakers to delay making decisions. Green screen is one of those technologies. It will get sorted in post-production.

Virtual Production requires that those same things now get sorted in pre-production. If a filmmaker has the choice of filming a green screen today, or filming a virtual set next month, they will choose the green screen almost all the time. Not because it saves time, but because it delays having to commit to anything. If you wait long enough, perhaps it might even become someone else's problem, and those are of course the best problems.

posted by philip-random at 2:27 PM on December 30, 2021 [25 favorites]


I appreciated the ad for rocks partway through Mr Sunday Movies' video.
posted by Well I never at 2:32 PM on December 30, 2021 [1 favorite]




One thing that stuck with me was one of the effects people talking about using models for ships being tricky because, even though they don't necessarily understand why it looks wrong to them, audiences can see that, for instance, the drops of water are too big. l

Back when WATERWORLD came out I was working as a PA for a sport fishing show.. one of our post-production guys went to see it - and came back with praise for how they handled the outdoors scenes where they were surrounded by water. We all teased him at first, but he made a very good point - filming water is just HARD, because it is always moving. So that means it is also changing color,, changing chopping, etc.. When you are an editor assembling clips and cutting them together, finding the right ones for what you need WHILE ALSO having water that plausibly looked consistent was a really tricky thing. And while he did grant that some of the other elements sucked, they got that bit right.

"So that's why the budget must have been so big," he said. "It was the only way to get the water right."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:43 PM on December 30, 2021 [5 favorites]


even though they don't necessarily understand why it looks wrong to them, audiences can see that, for instance, the drops of water are too big

Omg. There's one shot in Lord of the Rings where the Ents are destroying Isengard and they break a dam that starts gushing forth water and floods the land -- that shot has always looked terrible to me and I could never figure out why. But this is exactly it. The drops of water are too big.
posted by saturday_morning at 6:15 PM on December 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


There's a recent episode of Corridor Studios' VFX Artists React talking about Dune, and also comparing the new film to the 1984 David Lynch version. There's a bit (15:40 in) where they compare "worm eating a harvester" shots that gets into the 'sand' used for the miniature work, which for the older movie was microscopic glass bubbles. (Also requiring respirators/goggles/etc on set because the glass would be terrible for anyone inhaling it.)

There's also some interesting discussion of the motion blur for ornithopter wings; "normal" cg motion blur doesn't really handle motion that can change direction multiple times in a single frame. It's something that really stands out as well-done in the movie.
posted by ethand at 6:53 PM on December 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


Was going to recommend Cinefex magazine (“The Journal of Cinematic Illusions”) as the best source of VFX articles and film reviews. Sadly, after 40 years of publishing, they became a victim of the COVID-19 economic slowdown and stopped in February 2021. Their hardcopy back issues are out-of-print, but can be purchased/downloaded as iPad-only editions using their Cinefex app/reader (via the App Store).
posted by cenoxo at 8:16 PM on December 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


Veteran VFX wizard, stop-motion animator, and two-time Academy Award winner Phil Tippett (filmography; founder of Tippett Studio; show reels; projects) works with model and green screen for The Mandalorian (Season 2). See also the Tom Spina YT interview with Phil Tippett, Jon Berg, and Dennis Muren.

There’s no school like the old school and the new school teaching each other.
posted by cenoxo at 8:22 AM on December 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


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