I'm teaching an FX workshop in just under a month and I'm wondering - what NON-DIGITAL special effect would you like to learn how to do for your own films? This sort of feedback would help me in my presentation.

Actually, forget the digital limitation I've imposed and tell me - what tricky effect would you depict if you could?

did you see x-men 2? the smoke that billows when that guy (i forget his name i am not a comic book fan)shoots ...no i heard you have to do this with a camera that takes 8 fps. but is there another way to do it?


it also looks like portis heads video for sour times. where there is a boy floating in water and the are filming and its going in slow motion but you don't see the water and its flowing so smooth. i love that video. tried to find a link to the video but i couldn't. i will try to download it from a p2p and post it here.

bullet time : D Actually there's a number of ways to achieve the bullet-time effect without the fancy contraption. Granted, the particular one I used in my film wasn't the best : P there are a couple though. i've seen one where they blue screen someone from at least 8 different angles in the same position and composite it over a panorama of the background, looks really good for a lo-fi technique

I love old school optical effects, and hate it when people at school think I'm crazy for suggesting them as opposed to some poorly done digital counter part.

I have figured out a lot on my own, I'll try and post a short super-8 film I did when I was 16 tomarrow that has several FX in it. My favorite that I think budding filmmakers should be reminded of is the simple glass painting. My father showed me that one when I was young. It was so simple yet so effective. He painted a simple picture of a dark tower, added some screen to certain sections to give it a 3dish texture, taped some incense sticks to the back so the smoke was rising from the top of the tower. He then set up a frame holding the glass, so that the glass painting was superimposed on the Horizon over this small lake near our home. He set the camera up to shoot through the glass then had us walk around in the forground looking up. The end result looked as if my brother and I were looking across the lake at this tall dark smoking tower. It reminded me of Army of Darkness. Very simple effect that looked convincing considering the small budget and time he put towards it. Now everyone uses AfterEffects to just matte something like that in, but let's not forget the simpler and easier ways of the past.

Asylunt

Edit: About bullet time. A friend and I experimented with a bunch of disposable cameras set up halfway around someone and had them all set up on tripods. We then had a person on each of the cameras, yelled for them to be fired off at the same time, we then scanned all of those photos in and made each one last for 5 frames apiece. The end result was a simple bullet time effect. It didn't have motion in it, more like the Creed video where time just froze, but still cheap and effective. We needed to use more cameras, and digital pics would have been easier to work with than developing 8 rolls of film, but you get the idea.

That's helpful. I think I'll have to rent X-men 2 to see what you mean, Ms. Cat.

What I teach so far is:

Matte Paintings (bg of attached image)
Shufftan Shots
Pepper's Ghost
non-pyro bullet hits
intro to cable control
Modelling and life casting
making a corpse (legally!)
building no-budget props and set pieces
and no-budget miscellany

click to view

Nothing whatsoever involving computers and these are more geared to film than to video.

It was funny to see how blown away my students (ages 17-40) were over the Pepper's Ghost effect, when it's essentially a hunk of glass and a light on a dimmer switch.

Duke, your bullet time thing (which I thought was pretty cool) gave me a really good idea. You could totally do that with pixellation. That word was commandeered by computer geeks to mean image loss, but back in the day, it meant animating live objects. F'rinstance, your actor could jump in the air just as you snap a single frame, you move the camera slightly to the side and he does the same thing again keeping his same height off the ground and same body position - you repeat this until you've completed a full circle around him. It'd be done with one camera, all IN-camera. Kickass.

Asylunt, is your pappy a filmmaker?

Yes, my Dad's been messing around with it since the mid 70's, that's why I got into Super-8, sort of grew up on it.

Asylunt

Hanging out with Mr. Sable I can attest to the fact that you can do some absolutely amazing things in camera with very simple materials. Different film speeds, pixelization, forced perspective, filters, filming in reverse, if you think about things you can accomplish some tremendous effects very simply. Read about the early Sam Raimi in Bruce Campbell's "If Chins Could Kill."

I always try to accomplish FX in camera. For one thing its more fun. For another you learn more. Nothing looks worse to me than a digitally animated explosion. Plus someone (I can't never remember who) said something along the lines of "I'd rather see a cheesy model get blown up instead of some fancy CGI explosion any day of the week. At least I get the satisfaction of knowing that SOMETHING actually blew up."

There's a cool shot a friend of mine took a year or two ago on his digital camera of two of us throwing a manhole cover down onto the rim perfectly with no bounce or wobble. By reversing the shot and slowing it down it looks like they make the lid levitate into their hands. Very cool.

"I'd rather see a cheesy model get blown up instead of some fancy CGI explosion any day of the week. At least I get the satisfaction of knowing that SOMETHING actually blew up."

-paraphrased from my friend/peer/mentor Jeff Ferrari, Detroit based FX class teacher & magician from a post on a now defunct filmmakers forum.

Posted by curious cat did you see x-men 2? the smoke that billows when that guy (i forget his name i am not a comic book fan)shoots ...no i heard you have to do this with a camera that takes 8 fps. but is there another way to do it? it also looks like portis heads video for sour times. where there is a boy floating in water and the are filming and its going in slow motion but you don't see the water and its flowing so smooth. i love that video. tried to find a link to the video but i couldn't. i will try to download it from a p2p and post it here.

I have that on DVD it's on the Chris Cunningham director thing. It comes with a booklet and he has a little explanation. it's not for "sour times" it's for "only you", in case you're having trouble locating it.
Basically he shot it underwater with the actors and the water/light interaction "deadened" the highlights of the eyes and skin.
I'll assume this was in front of an underwater green screen.
Then he shot a very noir-ish cityscape at night. The shots were then composited.

That's my guess.

[edit- googled it and found this. I wasn't too far off ]
http://www.directo...unningham/524.html