Hi Lucas #12! After several weeks I finally understood that you are my only readership. As you definitely seemed to enjoy my last posts, I hope that you'll enjoy this one too. So, today, let's talk about special effects! I have chosen that subject specially for you because I made my own investigation about it and I think there are one or two interesting things to say about it. To be clear, I will talk here about handmade special effects, that means not computer generated special effects. This implies that I'll probably have to take older movies as examples in my topic.
Let's begin. You certainly know that before the democratisation of computers, that means before the early 80's, movie makers had to use tricks to create special effects. I will give you some examples of such special effects which have been made in an eccentric way.
The first example I wanted to give you is this one. Look at the picture on the left. It represents spectators in a shot of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). I think that summarizing the Star Wars saga is unnecessary, if you really want to know more about those movies, I recommend you this blog, which incidentally belongs to #13. Anyway, the shot comes from the well known podracing scene. Anyway, this shot is a special effect. Guess how the crowd has been made!
This has been made by Industrial Light & Magic. Eventually the "crowd" is an amount of painted cotton swabs which have been stuck into chicken wire on a miniature set of the arena. Moreover, some figurines have been placed on the stairs. Amazing, isn't it? I find it great! There's a little close-up of the crowd on the right side.
The next special effect I wanted to talk about comes from the movie The Ten Commandments (1956). It talks about Moses' life. I think that summarizing Moses' story is unnecessary, if you really want to know more about him, I recommend you this site. Anyway, there is a scene where Moses splits the sea. You can watch the scene here:
If you haven't watched the scene because you were to lazy, here is a GIF:
You may have noticed that the movie has been made in the 50's. That has probably been an ambitious project in 1956 to make the splitting of a sea on a screen. So, how is it made? Common and let your brain work a little bit to find a plausible explanation for this special effect. As strange as it can sound, all you need to do it is a camera and two garbage trucks filled with water. Cecil B. DeMille, the director, filmed the carbage trucks spilling the water on the ground. Then she turned the pictures upside down and placed them on top of the scene whith Moses. I find that it was well done for a sixty year old movie! Unfortunately, I will probably never ever watch this scene without thinking about garbage trucks...
These were my last words for today, I hope you enjoyed it!
