Presentation 5

What is special effect and visual effect? What are their differences?

Special effects used to refer to the optical illusions produced on film, television, theater and entertainment industries. These illusions are mostly used to simulate imagined events. However, with the emergence of digital film-making, there came to be a distinction for visual effects, which refer specifically to effects created digitally. Special effects thus only refer to effects produced with filming equipment or by using physical objects.

There are two kinds of special effects, optical effects and mechanical effects. Optical effects are effects created photographically. They either use in-camera effects such as using multiple exposure (to combine different images), mattes (to combine an image with a different background) and the Schüfftan process (to place life-sized actors in miniature sets), or they can be created in post-production using an optical printer (to re-photograph strips of film so as to apply optical effects e.g. fade outs and slow motion). Mechanical effects are those that can be achieved by physical objects, such as pyrotechnics, set design and prosthetic make-up. They also include atmospheric effects where wind, rain, etc are created.

Benefits and disadvantages of special/visual effect?

The benefits of visual effects include being able to simulate effects that are too expensive, dangerous, or difficult to achieve in real life. Visual effects can reduce costs and the effort needed to produce mechanical special effects (ie sets, props, make-up etc). It also removes the danger of actors and actresses filming with pyrotechnics (eg explosion scenes). More importantly, special/visual effects make movies much more interesting to watch, and hence are widely used to capture audience attention.

Disadvantages of special/visual effects include making the movies more unrealistic, and thus some audience members may feel that the movie is less believable and may relate less to it.

3 clips of special effects

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqeqaweXBV0)

The movie uses mechanical special effect (prosthetic make-up) to make Brad Pitt convincingly old. This probably more convincing than finding another actor to act as the old Benjamin Button. Visual effects are probably too troublesome, as the effect would have to be applied and changed accordingly as the actor moves.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWB1HGnA3tA)

The movie uses optical special effect. For example, the sky at 1:14 is actually matte (ie a painting of the sky and not the real sky, as seen at 0:27 – 0:32 in the next link). However, the other objects in the scene are real, so those nearer to the backdrop had to be scaled smaller to give the illusion of depth/distance. 

 

A Series of Unfortunate Events (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_-VJG1tdgk)

For mechanical special effect, the movie uses elaborate set designs as can be seen in this interview. This allows greater control as the filming process will not have to be subjected to problems such as weather conditions and location availability, but high costs and efforts were probably invested into producing the set. 

3 clips of visual effects

For some reason I seem to remember music videos better (maybe because of the songs), so I found two music videos with visual effects. As mentioned before, visual effects make the videos more interesting to watch. As for the last video, the visual effects complement the storyline as it is about supernatural beings that are supposed to achieve inhuman feats, so the visual effects are convincing.

Good Morning, Beautiful Dawn! - Crowd Lu (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTPVmB2m1Nk)

The whole music video is filmed in reverse. I remember watching the making of the video on MTV before, and basically the singer sat down and ate the food on the table. There were crew who handed him items (eg the flowers) off screen. The song was probably reversed and he lip synced to that, so that when the video is reversed in post-production, it'll look as though he is singing the song correctly. The challenge is probably remembering the actions and getting them right, as their order will be reversed for the final product.

The reverse makes the video interesting as it is impossible to achieve some of the actions in real life. For example, it is impossible to pour juice back into the bottle from a cup, or “unpeel” a banana. However, I do agree with one of the comments that it is sort of disturbing to see the singer “spitting out” food to their original state.

Chui Zhi You - Fama, C-Kwan feat. Khalil Fong (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt_20GBjc1U)

Yup, this is the same video from which I got inspiration for our second video (CNM is about) for the group project. The video shows the rapper painting a portrait of the singer, who is absent from the video, then whole video is fast-forwarded in post-production.

The fast-forward makes the video interesting, as it is impossible to paint at such a speed in real life. It also keeps the painting process more fast-paced and within the duration of the song, so that the audience will not be bored looking at someone painting. 

Supernatural (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz2migRftCY)

I remember watching this some time back. There are a lot of visual effects in this trailer. One of the more memorable effect from the show are the eyes of people changing color when they reveal that they are demons. Usually their pupils become enlarged and all black. This can be done in After Effects, as shown in this tutorial:http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/eye_replacement/.

The changing eyes are disturbing and thus complement the portrayal of demons as well as the supernatural theme of the show.