Posted on August 16, 2011 at 10:00 am
Robert Rodriguez told me that his favorite gadget in the new “Spy Kids” movie is the robot dog with the voice of Ricky Gervais. Here’s a closer look.
Posted on July 31, 2010 at 3:56 pm
It’s time to release the Kracken! I have FIVE copies of “Clash of the Titans” with Sam Worthington and some amazing stunts and special effects to give away to my beloved readers. The first five to send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Clash” in the subject line will be the winners.
And don’t forget the contests for James and the Giant Peach and Prime Suspect are still going!
Posted on February 22, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Wired Magazine has a fascinating story about the breathtaking special effects in “Coraline.” In an era when we are used to astonishingly “true” images generated by computers, the old-school charms of this stop-motion movie, where everything you see was actually there being photographed, enhanced with ground-breaking 3D technology, is entrancingly tactile. A painstaking process meant that no more than 2-4 seconds a day were completed, with thousands of tiny adjustments in each scene. The title character’s 200,000 facial expressions, required 350 top plates for her eyebrows and forehead and 700 bottom plates for her mouth.
It’s the stunningly inventive DIY visual effects that director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) used to bring the story to life. A quarter-million pieces of popcorn are transformed into cherry blossoms, superglue and baking soda are whipped into snow, and black fishing line becomes creepy chest hair.
In all, the crew hand-built 150 sets and 250 jointed puppets, as well as plants and toys with countless moving parts. “What makes this film different,” says Tom Proost, one of the art directors, “is that everything is real and everything moves.”
Every detail is brilliantly imagined and brilliantly executed. I love the way they created the steam from a tea kettle: cotton spritzed with hair spray. I’ve seen the film twice and plan to go back again just to see the extraordinary garden and theater scenes and to catch some of the many details I know I have missed.
Posted on January 13, 2009 at 5:20 pm
David Apatoff’s Illustration Art blog has a wonderful post on how the great illustration artist William A. Smith taught his daughter Kim how to draw and paint, and how she applied that in becoming a special effects designer for the movies. I love the way he connected the imagination and skill of the last generation of visual artists, who drew for books and magazines, to the place where the really imaginative visuals are now — movies.
Smith’s daughter Kim watched her father work and was inspired to follow in his footsteps. She learned traditional art skills from him. “He gave me LOTS of advice,” she recalled. “He talked about composition quite a bit. Also, that the whites of eyes aren’t white at all. He taught me to make a good green from yellow and black.” Kim learned to draw beautifully at a young age and went on to learn painting, printmaking and sculpting.
But when Kim began to work professionally she discovered that the art world had changed. The work that had sustained her father’s generation of artists was disappearing. She moved to the west coast, where she eventually found work in movies building models.
She ended up working on just about every blockbuster you can name, from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Star Wars” series to designing the white feather for “Forrest Gump.” Be sure to check out the video clip of some of her work on the blog.
Posted on January 7, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Den of Geek has made a list of the best movie special effects shots of all time — and the worst.
Special effects go back to the very beginning of film. The first great genius of special effects was George Melies, a stage magician. He was the one who figured out that he could make people appear and disappear by stopping the camera. His film “A Trip to the Moon” is still filled with charm. The rocket ship smashes into the face of the man in the moon. His moon creatures are delightfully acrobatic. The explorers come back to earth by just jumping off!
I visited the German museum of film in Frankfurt and learned that the German word for special effects is “filmtricks.” It has little to do with resources or technology — the special effects in the original 1933 “King Kong” hold up well more than 80 years later, and I think the best special effects of 2008 were in “Iron Man,” where they were almost entirely mechanical and not computer-generated. Just like everything else about the movies, it is the humans who make the difference, not the machines or the money.
Thanks to iorek for the excellent link!
