Real Special Effects

If you're like me, you've probably been fairly overwhelmed the past few months by the daunting piece of technology that is After Effects. Sure, it's capable of creating spaceships and monsters and making it look like you're in cool Martin Scorsese movies, but it also has the power to make you look like you have absolutely no idea what you're doing (like when your stupid birds flap their wings but don't actually fly anywhere). It can be frustrating, but also really rewarding.

However - as some posts have pointed out in the past - there are ways to work around the frustrations of After Effects: one of those ways being to perform real special effects instead of using a computer to generate them. I've written posts about how many films (some that you'd never expect) utilize CGI in their post-production process, but this post is about exactly the opposite. There are many films out there - looking at you, Christopher Nolan - that use far less CGI than has become the norm, and instead decide to stick to more "practical" (yes, I put that in quotations for a reason) special effects. Here's a list of a few movies that really surprised me.

1. Inception. I knew that the infamous 'rotating hallway' scene was done without the use of CGI, but I had no idea that two other key scenes in the film were made this way as well. There's one point where Leo Decaprio stands in a dream-world Japanese house, when all of a sudden, water comes crashing through the windows. Turns out, they had giant water cannons outside of the windows, and actually blasted Leo with 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of water. Likewise, the cafe explosion was done with practical effects: the filmmakers put air cannons around the actors and blew up the set surrounding Leo and Ellen Page.

2. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. There's a scene in the movie where Tom Cruise's character climbs the Burj Khalifa - the highest man-made structure in the world. Obviously fake, right? Well, knowing Tom Cruise, maybe this one's actually somewhat believable. Instead of creating a fake tower, the filmmakers let a man with a net worth of 250 million dollars literally run down the side of building hundreds of feet off the ground. That's dedication, no matter how insane.

3. Skyfall. I don't know what it is with dudes playing spies/special agents, but they have a penchant for doing their own stunts. In the newest James Bond movie, Daniel Craig was actually on top of a speeding train, attached with nothing but a super thin wire. They also - this one really got me - actually crashed a subway train through a wall. Craig was added into the scene via greenscreen later (for obvious reasons, I think.) In fact, the only major special effects used in the movie were the blowing up of MI6 and the scene where Bond fights off a Komodo Dragon.

Unfortunately, if you're like me and overwhelmed with After Effects, you can't just say "screw CGI, let's go crash a real train through a wall." That's something that Hollywood can do, not a broke college student who steals cutlery from the dining hall. Practical effects are amazing: I think they'll always trump computer generated effects when it comes to looking realistic, because...they are. However, you have to take the good with the bad, and, like Daniel Craig, understand that you while you may be able to derail a subway train, you don't necessarily want to be there when it happens. That's where After Effects comes in.

To see these examples and more, visit check out the original posts from Cracked.com here and here.

5 Great Movies and Maya

This week, I was completely blown away and excited by Autodesk's program Maya. I have watched several different "behind-the-scenes" documentaries on several different films, and was able to watch as they created environments and creatures. For example, I loved watching how they made the creatures of the Lord of the Rings, and it is only now that I realized that they used the program Maya! I was so excited, and still am, to learn different aspects of Maya, even though there is so much depth and jobs involved in it. As I was researching I came across this article about 5 other movies that used Autodesk programs and the one thing they all had in common?: Maya.

The first was Inception, where they folded over the streets of Paris and had amazing settings.

Then there was Avatar, which was truly amazing with it's ability to combine live action 3D and CG effects. The actors of Avatar were so talented to be able to be on a virtually empty set and still perform as if they were in that actual environment.

Third on the list was Alice In Wonderland, which ties in my previous blog! Not only did they green screen most of the movie, but to find out that they used Maya as well really brought both concepts together in a way I never expected.

Fourth, was Iron Man 2. This was really cool to read because they not only used Autodesk 3D programs, but also made parts of the suits in actual life around the actors. Then they molded the suits later in computer graphics.

 Finally, and least expected, was Black Swan, when Natalie Portman turned into the swan.

Reading this article was eye-opening. There were a few that I suspected used Autodesk programs like Maya, but there were others that I never expected to find. After my brief experience, I can't imagine the amount of time it would take to do the things they accomplished in these films. It is truly incredible to continue to learn how "movie magic" is done.

By Amber Capogrossi

Inception

 Inception the movie is one of the most mind bending movies in are life time using dreams and different dimensions  Christopher Nolan used little computer-generated imagery, preferring practical effects whenever possible. Nolan said, "It's always very important to me to do as much as possible in-camera, and then, if necessary, computer graphics are very useful to build on or enhance what you have achieved physically."Paul Franklin visual effects supervisor built a small mountain fortress set and then blew it up for the film. For the fight scene that takes place in zero gravity, he used CGI effects to subtly bend elements like physics, space and time." By creating real models of the cityscapes and the water flowing through the buildings made the special effects have more depth and look more realistic. 

Inception

The first time I saw a trailer for Inception I was pretty excited.  Aside from the fact that it was being made by Christopher Nolan who directed The Dark Knight (a movie that I also really liked a lot), and that the ensemble cast was amazing, the trailer just looked really really cool.  Since there wasn't a lot of plot points shown in the trailer, the things that got me excited were the special effects.  Inception used special effects really well to help create the atmosphere and help explain the story.  It also used those effects very realistically considering how out of the box some of them were.  I like that there was a mixture of complex and simple effects. Some things I feel like I could do now (like slow motion shots) but other effects seem very complicated. At one point the city seems to fold on top of itself and it doesn't look fake, it looks like the world is just changing. The scope of some of these effects is super large too. Like in the dream world, there are establishing shots of a city that is literally crumbling. And of course there are some really cool zero gravity scenes that look awesome. I would love to learn about how they managed to do all of the special effects in this film. 

Inception Inspired

Over the week, I saw a commercial involving a car that appeared to be inspired by the movie Inception. At first, I was only half paying attention, because I wasn't watching TV for the commercials, but my eyes drifted to the screen because of the amount of movement that was happening. Once I was focused on the TV, I felt seasick and wished the commercial would end- but I couldn't look away because I had to see how much worse it got. Of course, now that I have a minute to sit down and write about said commercial, I can't remember what the commercial was for (a car, auto insurance, etc;).

In my quest to find this offensive commercial I found that Lexus has created three different commercials for their vehicles that also seem to be inspired by Inception. The differences I felt between the Lexus commercials and the mystery commercial is that Lexus used creative graphic effects but didn't suffocate the audience with sensory overload. The cuts used are not too fast and give the viewer time to process what is happening. Lexus also didn't overuse Z axis manipulation. Although in these commercials the Z axis is changing and the shot appears to flip onto it's side, I still know where I am at all times. Lexus isn't the only one using Inception for ideas. I also found an LG commercial for a vacuum that seems to be inspired by Inception. I feel that since the film came out in theatres, more and more media professionals are trying to incorporate full scale graphic effects.

Visual Effects: Inception

One of my favorite movies right now is Inception. I was fascinated by how real all the different worlds looked. The visual effects crew took all kinds of different approaches to make it look real. They had to look at every aspect of each world, like the way the people walked, and how every single building looked, if their were birds flying around, etc. A lot of Inception was done in visual effects and you forget that when you watch it because it all looks so real. The two videos I posted talk about how the visual effects crew worked on the movie and what they had to do to make it look right.


The Making of Inception and Inception: Visual Effects

I am excited to learn some basics about visual effects and animation. After watching movies like Inception you really appreciate the special effects part of making a movie.