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In the era before computers and cheap digital technology, moviemakers had to
rely much more on practical and in-camera effects.
Let's talk about the terminology and the jargon here.
Special effects are different from visual effects.
Special effects are captured live by a camera. In other words, what you see is what you get.
The camera records an event as it happens,
and there's no special visual effect or trick photography involved.
I like to use the word "practical" effects instead of special effects,
because i think that has less ambiguity.
A practical effect is one that is real in some sense.
And the term "practical" comes from theater.
A practical light, for example, is one that is in the narrative or in the story.
Whereas a stage light is not in the fictional world that the characters are in.
So, "practical" in filmmaking and in image-making
means that it has some sort of real existence, and it's not a trick
imposed by the camera or later post-processing.
A miniature set is a perfect example of a practical effect.
Here's a very impressive model
of Hogwarts Castle, from Harry Potter: The Exhibition.
In order to effectively tell a story, of course we need to incorporate
live action with miniatures. Let's take a look at a couple of ways of doing that.
One is to use a hanging miniature.
And this is model that's placed close to the camera
and because of the illusion of forced perspective
the miniature looks big.
And it's used for set extension, primarily.
Here's an illustration showing a hanging miniature close to the camera
producing the illusion of a finished set.
The ceiling is a miniature, the rest of the set is full scale.
Another example of a hanging miniature.
This uses a model placed on a sheet of glass that can move towards or away from the camera
to simulate the space landing.
Another illustration of a hanging miniature,
and of course the actors would be in the rear of the set far away from the camera
and the miniature elements up close.
Miniatures can, of course, incorporate other aspects such as painted backdrops
or mechanisms, such as ...
"Metropolis," the famous film from 1927, Fritz Lang.
One of the most important films in special effects.
And this is showing the production of the film.
In the background we've got a painted backdrop,
and then in the foreground we've got a miniature city.
And all the cars are on wires so that they can be moved
by technicians off-screen during the filming.
Moving on to another type of practical effect: prosthetics.
This is an artificial extension of an actor's body.
And prosthetics come into play whenever ordinary makeup technique just doesn't
quite get the transformation that we need.
Another sci-fi classic, "Planet of the Apes," from 1968,
of course made extensive use of prosthetics to transform the actors into apes.
The next step beyond prosthetics is animatronics,
which is sort of a combination between puppets and robots.
Animatronics are usually remotely controlled by puppeteers off-screen.
Here's Yoda from "The Empire Strikes Back,"
and that's Frank Oz on the right.
Those are some of the major categories of practical effects.
Now let's take a look at visual effects,
which are, for lack of a better word, trick photography.
They're created artificially.
What you see on the screen is not what happened on the set.
Something's intervened to create an illusion.
Here's a simple example of the difference between a practical effect
and a visual effect.
A real-time miniature is practical.
We're shooting reality when we shoot a miniature. If the camera's running at the
normal speed, and we're shooting the miniature as it happened, then
in a way, we shot reality, just at a different scale.
However, if we take two images and combine them and superimpose them,
that's a visual effect.
What we see on the screen is not exactly what happened on the set.
In a way, visual effects are as old as photography. Ever since cameras were
invented, people have been creating trick photographs.
For example, these are the Cottingley fairies.
And people were taken in by this, they thought it was real.
Even though if we look at it now, it seems pretty clear that those are
drawings or paintings that have been pasted onto the photograph.
The most basic visual effect is an in-camera effect called multiple exposure.
And by in-camera, I mean that the effect itself happens inside the camera.
In the old days of analog film
you would expose the film once, usually,
and you capture the image.
But you can rewind the film in the camera
and record it again.
And that's a multiple exposure.
Expose the film to the light more than once.
And each time that you expose the film, you can have a different setup.
Maybe you shoot a background and then you shoot again,
a main character against a black backdrop, making that character appeared ghostly, superimposed.
Or maybe you have a mask that you place over the lens to prevent light coming in
from certain directions.
Here's an example of a double exposure from F. W. Murnau's
"Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," from 1922.
This is the climax of the film in which the vampire is being killed by the sunlight.
And it was a simple matter to shoot this.
Basically, they filmed it twice.
Once with the actor in the shot and once without.
And they just cleverly moved masks across the lens at precise moments
so that they got an evenly exposed film.
To achieve more complex effects for double and multiple exposures,
you can use masks or mattes.
And a mask is just basically a cutout that prevents light from
getting to the film.
And this mask or matte can be
outside the camera on a frame,
or it can be inside the camera
placed in the film gate.
A matte painting takes the idea
of a mask or a matte one step further.
A matte simply blocks light from reaching certain parts of the film.
With a matte painting instead of just having an opaque matte,
you can create an image in that area.
And the way to do that is by painting on glass.
In this illustration,
part of the building has been destroyed,
but the script called for a completed building.
An artist came and created the matte painting on glass
so that if the camera is in exactly the right place
it looks as if the arches are complete.
This illustration shows
a matte painting, used, once again, for set extension.
The bottom of the set is where the actors are filmed,
and the top is all one giant matte painting.
And here they've used multiple sheets of glass
so they can get a panorama.
Matte paintings started out as
in-camera visual effects, but eventually it became possible to create them in post
and then combine the two elements together.
And this is another classic example,
"Planet of the Apes,"
the matte painting of the iconic final scene from that film.
Looking back to "Metropolis" from 1927, once again a groundbreaking film
in the history of visual effects.
the cinematographer's name was Eugen Schüfftan,
and he invented an early in-camera compositing technique that bears his name,
the Schüfftan process.
And the idea was to use a piece of glass that was only partially mirrored.
Here's a diagram of the Schüfftan process.
The camera is looking into a piece of glass that's partially mirrored.
The glass is at a 45 degree angle,
and anywhere there's a mirrored surface
it will reflect the image of a miniature set.
And anywhere the glass is transparent, the camera will be able to see through the glass
to see a full-sized set in the distance.
And in this case, the mirroring is in the center
of the piece of glass
and a live actor on a full-size set
is being reflected in the mirror.
The glass is transparent on the outside
and that allows the camera to see something on the other side.
And in this case it's looking at a rear projection.
One common in-camera effect that we see in early films is called the Pepper's Ghost.
It actually came from stagecraft,
in which a pane of glass is used to partially reflect another scene.
Here's an illustration of the Pepper's Ghost in action, in a theater.
This sheet of glass at 45 degrees reflects an image,
so the end result for the audience is that there's a ghostly image on the stage.
And this technology is still in use, in fact, at Disneyland
for the Haunted Mansion.
I'll conclude this discussion of practical and in-camera effects
by referring back to "Metropolis" once again.
This is perhaps the most complex in-camera effect
that's ever been achieved.
And there's actually still some debate over how it was accomplished,
but we do know that it was done through many passes,
without the benefit of an optical printer or any other way of compositing.
This is probably the peak of the art of in-camera visual effects.