Investigation Blog Post 4

 

Introduction: For this week's blog post I wanted to look into Special effects without computer graphics. Before digital effects where used film makers had to be very creative with how special effects were made and created. I was inspired to look into this after watching Hugo again for the end of the school year last year. It inspired me how  created and made his special effects for his films. Today we see a lot of CGI used in movies and a good amount of practical effects are still used too and both do look advanced and very real. While looking into how special effects it definitely is an art how they were able to create them.

Inspiration: (I researched how movies used to be made and here are some of the cool facts I found)

The first special effect was in a 1895 Edison Film, when Alfred Clark recreated the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. When he did have all the actors hold completely still, with the exception of the actress playing Mary, while he paused the camera. Then Mary was replaced with a dummy before filming started again. Its more simple but even that takes talent with all of the actors standing very still. It also inspired the creation of stop motion and animation, and people really thought a lady died in the film. The Behedging of Queen Mary

One of the earliest "special effects' was in 1902's Le Voyage Dans La Lune the effects were largely creations of George Méliès, who directed hundreds of short films before working on this masterpiece. Méliès brought together the effects used in these other films into one work of art, including double exposure, split screens and dissolves and fades. It's pretty cool how they were able to make special effects when the technology wasn't really available to make them more realistic yet.

Animations were also made, one of the first films was Winsor McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur it shows him intersecting with a dinosaur. This was the first example of a person appearing to enter an animation and interact with the cartoon. It was one of the first highly successful animations because audiences were so enamored with the personality of the massive beast.

Blue screening was used in film too, but the process was much more complex in the beginning. When a film called The Lost World portrayed humans running away from stop-motion animated monsters, they actually had to film things with an optical printer. This required blacking out all but the actors on the top film, then blocking out where the actors would appear on the stop-motion film and printing them onto a third roll of film. It was a bit of a long process.

Another way of creating new scenery, most used painted backgrounds like The Wizard of Oz. Metropolis used elaborate sets by projecting the top of a massive-looking building (often just a model) onto a mirror located in the top portion of the camera frame. The camera would then shoot the actors performing in front of a wall, which appeared to have the tops of the impressive sets seen in the projection.

Animatronics were also used and one of the biggest complaints about CGI technology is that it still looks inferior to well done animatronics. These tricky effects actually were first used over 100 years ago, when Richard Murphy created a mechanical eagle for D.W. Griffith's Rescued From An Eagle's Nest in 1908. While the bird was not the best animatronic device, it set the stage for Jaws and other famous animatronic monsters.

Film makers before CGI had to get very creative with how they made effects. One of the things I like about practice effects sometimes is that you can tell how much effort they put into them to make them as practical as possible. The effects don't always look the best, but the effects were certainly good for when they were created. Here is the source I used for my research: Special Effects Before CGI

Brainstorming/Experimentation: 
Creating practical effects is defiantly a lot easier now than it was then. It's fun to make your own short films and make things look real. Ways to create realistic backgrounds are now almost perfected. We see movies all the time and sometimes we don't even realize that they used a green screen or CGI. If I were to create a film with special effects I would probably do a mix of practical and editing skills. I probably wouldn't be able to do something fancy, but as long as it gave me a learning experience that all that would matter to me. Me and my cousin Mikayla like to make short films together. They don't always make sense, but they're still fun to make. We have made films with special effects where we've edited the video, or tried to make something realistic. Its fun to create your own video and create a new world within that video.
 
Reflection: Researching how special effects used to be done was a fun experience. After looking at silent films last week I now know about Silent films and how the effects were made in those films. Films are great at taking us on a journey to a new world whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Special effects help tell the story on screen. A big film series that relies on special effects a lot is Star Wars and without the special effects it wouldn't be as exciting as it is. We owe a lot of storytelling in movies to special effects since they really do help us tell a story, even if the effects are minor. Filmmakers back before CGI were really creative with how they created special effects and it's even more amazing today how far special effects have come.

Work Log: This week I finished my script and made my storyboard. I also made a list of places to film and worked on my pre production blog post.