Pan's Labyrinth - Physical and Digital Special Effects

Pan's Labyrinth has long been one of my favorite films. Premiering in 2006 by director Guillermo Del Toro (who also directed Hellboy and Pacific Rim), Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful combination of makeup and physical special effects blended with computer effects.

Considering Del Toro has a background in special effects makeup, it's no surprise that he tends to want all effects to be present in the set. While shooting his latest film, Crimson Peak, Del Toro remarked that having a set built, instead of green screen, allowed the actors to give better performances and the final product to have a more lifelike quality.

Some great scenes where the digital effects really bring the fantasy to life include a scene at the beginning where a stick bug emerges from a broken statue, the stones walls of the Labyrinth opening up for the main character as she makes her way through the maze, and a scene in a courtroom of magical people. Another effect that is remarkable is that for the faun, his costume was built, but many aspects of the human anatomy don't mesh with a faun's, so the team had to create green screen wraps for certain body parts and they would fix it in post, creating a creature that looks completely fantastical.

Pan's Labyrinth will always be a favorite of mine and Del Toro will always be one of my favorite directors. His monster's and dark fairy tales are exactly what I want to explore further, and I can not wait to see what he has planned.

Pan's Labyrinth and Special Effects



One of my favorite scenes:

Pans Labyrinth - Special Effects

Pans Labyrinth is a popular movie that came out in 2006. This movie is filled with special effects. I watched a few videos on how they made this movie and I found it very interesting. To create the different creatures they would combine using traditional makeup effects and digital effects. For example they would do some sort of crazy makeup up to a mans face to make it distorted but then after they shot it they would digitally edit the face on the computer using special effects to get exactly wanted they wanted.

They would also use green screens to get the effects they needed. For example, there is a creature that has different legs then human legs. They put a man in a costume but then to edit the legs they needed they would put green fabric around his legs. They could then later edit out his original legs and replace it with the new ones.

Guillermo Del Toro was the writer and director of this movie and I thought his vision of what these characters should look like came across very well. I posted a video below that gives a good description of what the special effects and makeup team had to do to make these different creatures in the film come to life.