The effect was actually done using retroreflective tape; the building were indeed a physical model, with the edges covered in 3M Scotchlite tape. From first-hand experience (on other movies) the camera is placed behind a half-silvered mirror placed with a 45 degree tilt, with a projector underneath (in this case shining green light). The net result is the camera and projector are on the same optical axis, so no shadows are visible and because the tape (retro)reflects so strongly that's the only thing that shows up.
We used exactly the same technique on 'Superman', but projecting footage in sync with the camera and the most massive screen of Scotchlite behind the actors (it's must've been something like 200 feet wide and 50 high, so big we had to dig a curved trench several feet deep in the floor of Pinewood's A stage to fit it all in (my boss at the time won an Oscar for the flying FX).
That looks like interesting stuff; I was working recently with older 'black' retroreflective materials and the performance wasn't great so we ditched it. I'm in the UK, is it on the market yet or do I need to go through the in-country 3M office?
Superman was the last movie my grandfather worked on before he retired. He was with British Lion so probably at Shepperton Studios/Sound City unit, not Pinewood. If you do read this, please send me an email, would be great to see if you ever crossed paths.
Couldn't find your email, but unlikely as I was with the Zoptics unit at Pinewood and we didn't do sound (our gear made a lot of noise!). Spent a lot of my youth around the Chertsey/Staines area though so it's possible. Email sfx at tessierlabs.com if you like, on the offchance.
Note: The "email" field in your profile is private (for password reset and similar stuff). If you want to make it public you must copy it to the "about" field.
I'd be interested to know what folks in your field think of the newly developed substance [1]'Vantablack'. Thin carbon tubes that apparently absorb 99.965% of visible light. Are there any cool applications for this stuff in practical effects?
I've been out of SFX for decades so can't speak for current practice; anything really black (classically velvet/black flock) is (was?) useful for hiding all sorts of things from the camera. So I'm just guessing here, but because cameras (more specifically the sensors) are much more limited than the human eye in terms of the range of brightness they can handle it's probably more useful in scientific/direct view applications.
No need to take my word for it. See "Editing and Special/Visual Effects" by Charlie Keil, Kristen Whissel p. 222:
"One of the more ingenious examples is Escape From New York, which features a wire-frame flight approach display constructed by adding reflective tape to all the building edges of a miniature city model"
It was also covered in Cinefex (must've been sometime in the early 80's if you want to search the back catalogue).
On the other hand, I've just watched a behind the scenes video [1] about Mission Impossible: Fallout, and was absolutely shocked by how much of it was shot in real life.
Basically, most of it. When I saw the movie, I would've bet my left kidney that 90% of the effects were green screen, I definitely would never have guessed that the skydivig scene, helicopter chase, and the canyon fight are for real. I could barely believe such canyon existed! Absolutely stunning.
Agreed, that's incredible. As I watch that it strikes me that one of the underrated uses of CGI is to make practical effects possible that wouldn't have been before. An actor can safely fall out of a helicopter or jump between rooftops, knowing that rigging can easily be painted out.
I believe Tom Cruise learned how to fly a helicopter just for that role. Dude's batshit but he has incredible respect for his craft.
The whole time during that massive car chase, I was just trying to focus on when it was clearly CGI and when it was clearly a real goddamn car chase. The transitions were so seamless that I only caught maybe 3-4 examples of CGI.
Thanks, I enjoyed that a lot more than I enjoyed the actual movie. (although I enjoyed that too) A bit like Burden of Dreams vs Fitzcarraldo[0]. In both pairs, the fictional story seems trivial in a lot of ways compared with the real story. Maybe that's often or usually the case? Well, I don't think it's likely I would've enjoyed Terry Gilliam's Quixote or Jodorowsky's Dune more than I did the amazing documentaries about them. (Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowky's Dune)
[0] Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a Werner Herzog movie about a guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, which plan involves hauling a ship over a hill between 2 rivers. Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary about the making of the movie.
Makes you wonder why they took the risks at all when special effects are so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore. Maybe they actually made a mistake by getting the scenes so perfect.
>...so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore.
There is a lot of CGI that just looks fake. I would even say most, at least to me. I go back to Star Wars (ep 4). The physical models still look good. The original Blade Runner still looks good. I've also noticed that CGI movies look okay in the theater, but once they hit the high compression formats like Blu-ray or streaming, the CGI really becomes noticeable. The practical stuff still looks good in these formats. Go back and watch Hunt For Red October, and know that during the submarine underwater scenes are just physical models in rooms of smoke to simulate underwater. I really notice when they do 100% CGI characters like Spiderman and Hulk.
Reminds me of the hallway fight scene from Inception. The fact that they build an entire rotating set instead of relying on CG is what (I think) makes the scene so much more convincing.
Part of this is also particular to Tom Cruise and other obsessive action stars like Jackie Chan who commit to doing as many of their own stunts as possible. That's got to significantly affect that planning for these scenes (and save money).
I believe that it’s almost always wayyyyyyyy more expensive to CGI the thing. Sort of amazing to think about, but I think smashing up a bunch of cars, flying a bunch of helicopters, etc, is simply much cheaper than faking it with a convincing level of fidelity.
For the reward. Cruise produced the movie in bigger part. The more money they spent, the bigger write off they got. At least I was explain it that way by a friend who happens to direct in Hollywood for about 12 years now.
Discussions of older effects work always make note of the high manual labor effort. But increasingly I'm not convinced that we really have things that much different in the CGI era. Certain things can be done in a commodity fashion(e.g. instancing thousands of AIs to make an army) but a good visual effect is designed and crafted, not manufactured. You don't get great animation just by scaling up the processing power.
So you still end up with labor effort, but proportionately more goes to the intellectual parts of modelling it on the computer, instead of hiring a crew to sweat over an array of painted glass, miniatures, and puppets. When CGI visuals got really popular for the first time in the 90's and 00's, they often suffered from the belief that the computer would make post-production so fast that the up-front design could be avoided in favor of a brute force "just redo it in post until it looks good" approach. And this is an appealing pitch on the surface, since it means more aspects of the work can stay undecided until the very end. Indecision is one of the things that drives a lot of software complexity.
But that kind of futurism isn't touted nearly as much as it used to be. It adds unnecessary risk for expensive mistakes, underwhelming visuals and awkward editing. Post work is still a huge part of doing blockbuster cinema, but it's been supplemented with extensive testing and a resurgent trend of in-camera effects. Meanwhile, the studios that provide CGI services are treated as commodity labor, just like yesteryear's model painters.
It was not too much CG, but rather the wrong approach to it. If you stick an actor into a green screen you need to do your damnest as a director to make clear to them what the invisible part of the setting is. As far as I know Lucas failed to handle that correctly.
Newer productions with actually capable directors got this right. There was a reason why Lord of the Rings employed previs animations before filming to figure out what the sequence will be. Weta Dgitial gave James Cameron a tracked virtual camera inside the motion capture rig with a real time preview of the Navi so that he could direct the camera while his actors where playing out the movie in a nonexistent jungle in a really drab gray studio with no props. There are tons of examples how the industry has learned to take CG as a tool and tame its abstract nature to make it useable.
The discussion of the title effect for The Thing (painted glass, burning garbage bag, fishtank full of smoke) reminded me that the well-known Windows 10 default wallpaper[1] is, surprisingly, a practical effect. It's a pane of glass etched with the Windows logo suspended in front of a black background, with a bright light shining in from the side and a fog machine going.
The model shots as CGI reminds me of RoboCop's "thermal vision". Renting an actual heat sensing camera was too expensive, so they just filmed people in black spandex covered in fluorescent paints under a black light.
It's so close to holding up though. If they had blurred it a smidge so you don't see the folds in the spandex it'd be perfectly fine. Thermal cameras aren't known for their high resolution anyway.
In the movie 2001, the computers feature flat screen displays because they were actually displaying rear projection film. This accidentally gave it a more futuristic look than later sci-fi’s such as Alien and Blade Runner which featured bulbous CRT computer screens.
Also, like in OP’s tweets, there were no actual computers involved in the production of 2001. All of the displayed 3D wireframe models were films of physical wireframe models.
I suspect the dated-even-for-the-time computers in Alien and Bladerunner were a deliberate choice. For example the painfully slow screen updates in Alien must have been a deliberate choice, monitors of the time were fully capable of near-instantly displaying a screen of text.
It seems likely to me that they wanted to give an impression of a low-budget operation using antiquated tech. The Nostromo is a bulk cargo carrier crewed by little more than space truckers, it wouldn't have the swanky latest tech of the time, but how do you portray that? You can't try to portray people using 2050s tech in a film set in 2100, say, and expect people to get that it's supposed to be crappy old gear.
The effects in 2001 are breathtaking. Have you ever watched all the windows in the spaceships and stations? They aren't just white matte fakeouts, but actual filmsets with extras moving around overlaid with the model work. Building these sets, filming the inserts from the right angles and compositing that onto the final film in a purely optical process took an enormous amount of labor. I wonder why noone ever talks about that.
There’s a scene in a cockpit that was filmed with rear-projected computer screens and black windshields. That film was stored and later re-exposed filming a miniature moon landscape filmed through the windshield of a miniature black cockpit viewing a miniature moon base with black windows. That film was stored again then re-exposed to film people walking around through the windows of a full-sized black moon base.
My favorite story of practical effects on a John Carpenter film is about the portal at the end of Prince of Darkness, where a character reaches through a mirror to hell. The effect was achieved using a large pool of mercury, which the crew had "liberated" from the hydraulic system of a rented piece of heavy machinery. They filmed for one night, got the shots they needed then replaced the mercury before anyone noticed.
This was a terrible idea for many, many reasons. But they got the film made.
I have no idea where you would get mercury from a hydraulic system on anything. This story kind of sounds like urban legend, or the crew had no idea what they were taking apart.
Having worked in SFX, I guess it was probably from a Chapman (a sort of crane balanced seesaw big enough to hang cameramen and cameras from) - at one time (presumably no longer) I believe they used a big reservoir of mercury to achieve fine balance, to the extent you could move swing them around manually.
Amusing side note: They had a locking lever when obviously had to be engaged when the cameraman wasn't on the end. If someone freed the lever with the crane out of balance, the results could be quite catastrophic (source: I could've been killed on one occasion).
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We used exactly the same technique on 'Superman', but projecting footage in sync with the camera and the most massive screen of Scotchlite behind the actors (it's must've been something like 200 feet wide and 50 high, so big we had to dig a curved trench several feet deep in the floor of Pinewood's A stage to fit it all in (my boss at the time won an Oscar for the flying FX).
Let me know if you want a sample :)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
"One of the more ingenious examples is Escape From New York, which features a wire-frame flight approach display constructed by adding reflective tape to all the building edges of a miniature city model"
It was also covered in Cinefex (must've been sometime in the early 80's if you want to search the back catalogue).
Basically, most of it. When I saw the movie, I would've bet my left kidney that 90% of the effects were green screen, I definitely would never have guessed that the skydivig scene, helicopter chase, and the canyon fight are for real. I could barely believe such canyon existed! Absolutely stunning.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=lCv59-y123g&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o
The whole time during that massive car chase, I was just trying to focus on when it was clearly CGI and when it was clearly a real goddamn car chase. The transitions were so seamless that I only caught maybe 3-4 examples of CGI.
[0] Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a Werner Herzog movie about a guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, which plan involves hauling a ship over a hill between 2 rivers. Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary about the making of the movie.
There is a lot of CGI that just looks fake. I would even say most, at least to me. I go back to Star Wars (ep 4). The physical models still look good. The original Blade Runner still looks good. I've also noticed that CGI movies look okay in the theater, but once they hit the high compression formats like Blu-ray or streaming, the CGI really becomes noticeable. The practical stuff still looks good in these formats. Go back and watch Hunt For Red October, and know that during the submarine underwater scenes are just physical models in rooms of smoke to simulate underwater. I really notice when they do 100% CGI characters like Spiderman and Hulk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PhiSSnaUKk
So you still end up with labor effort, but proportionately more goes to the intellectual parts of modelling it on the computer, instead of hiring a crew to sweat over an array of painted glass, miniatures, and puppets. When CGI visuals got really popular for the first time in the 90's and 00's, they often suffered from the belief that the computer would make post-production so fast that the up-front design could be avoided in favor of a brute force "just redo it in post until it looks good" approach. And this is an appealing pitch on the surface, since it means more aspects of the work can stay undecided until the very end. Indecision is one of the things that drives a lot of software complexity.
But that kind of futurism isn't touted nearly as much as it used to be. It adds unnecessary risk for expensive mistakes, underwhelming visuals and awkward editing. Post work is still a huge part of doing blockbuster cinema, but it's been supplemented with extensive testing and a resurgent trend of in-camera effects. Meanwhile, the studios that provide CGI services are treated as commodity labor, just like yesteryear's model painters.
You still need a lot of artists for CGI. Someone needs to sculpt and paint all those 3D models, and rig them, animate them, etc.
The difference is that they use ZBrush to sculpt digital models instead of actual brushes, but the work still needs to be done.
You also need engineers. ILM employs a lot of people who work on physical simulations to get the effects they need.
You can do things digitally that aren't possible with real world models, but I don't think it's cheaper or less labour intensive.
Newer productions with actually capable directors got this right. There was a reason why Lord of the Rings employed previs animations before filming to figure out what the sequence will be. Weta Dgitial gave James Cameron a tracked virtual camera inside the motion capture rig with a real time preview of the Navi so that he could direct the camera while his actors where playing out the movie in a nonexistent jungle in a really drab gray studio with no props. There are tons of examples how the industry has learned to take CG as a tool and tame its abstract nature to make it useable.
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/windo...
It's clever, but I don't think it really holds up: https://youtu.be/Md14H_qD8iQ
I always thought that shot looked weird, but I never questioned the wireframes in Escape From New York.
Also, like in OP’s tweets, there were no actual computers involved in the production of 2001. All of the displayed 3D wireframe models were films of physical wireframe models.
It seems likely to me that they wanted to give an impression of a low-budget operation using antiquated tech. The Nostromo is a bulk cargo carrier crewed by little more than space truckers, it wouldn't have the swanky latest tech of the time, but how do you portray that? You can't try to portray people using 2050s tech in a film set in 2100, say, and expect people to get that it's supposed to be crappy old gear.
This was a terrible idea for many, many reasons. But they got the film made.
Amusing side note: They had a locking lever when obviously had to be engaged when the cameraman wasn't on the end. If someone freed the lever with the crane out of balance, the results could be quite catastrophic (source: I could've been killed on one occasion).
Aha, and here's an article about them:-
http://hollywoodjuicer.blogspot.com/2008/12/adventures-in-gr...
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/55hb2h/could_me...
Perhaps taken from some other application of mercury...
Lots of interesting insight into production tricks used for a modern low-budget sci-fi film. Including graphic/motion design, sets and visual effects.