Museum of the Moving Image Trip: Practical Effects

During our trip to the Museum of the Moving Image, I was most captivated by the exhibits on makeup and practical special effects. Today, computer graphics dominate the special effects industry. By using a computer, scenes can be filmed in distant worlds, actors can become bizarre creatures, and just about any stunt can be performed by digital lookalikes. However, it wasn’t always so linear. Special effects existed long before computer graphics, but they took a lot of creativity. A great example is the use of makeup. Today, makeup isn’t as thorough a process. Computer generated effects do most of the work of making a character’s face convincing. In the past, a lot of effort went into making masks and make-up that seemed lifelike while being filmed. One of the exhibits showed the make-up from the film “Little Big Man”. The film tells the story of the last surviving witness of Custer’s last stand. The main character, who is portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, appears as an elderly man and a young man. Rather than use two actors, Hoffman was transformed into his older self by using a special foam latex mask that fit so well that it could even blink!

The special effects section contained the Yoda puppet from The Empire Strikes Back. The puppet was extremely intricate and seemed to be alive when I watched the movie as a child. Even now, I still find the old Yoda very convincing. However, I can see his drawbacks. As a puppet, he must always stay on the ground, where the puppeteers are hidden. In the original trilogy, Yoda wasn’t very active. All he did was shuffle from place to place and speak. When Yoda was reinvented as a computer generated character, he became something of an acrobat and even had his own fight scene. That could never be done with a puppet. The other problem with make-up and puppets is that they’re not very expressive. A mask doesn’t have any facial muscles and the thicker it is, the less it moves with the wearer’s face. Puppets also have a limited range of expressions. It takes a lot of engineering to get a puppet to move realistically. On the other hand, computer graphics will never be physical objects. They’re harder for actors to interact with and they reflect light and cast shadows in a way that reminds you that they’re not actually there. I think that practical effects will always have a place in the world of film for this reason.

Blog 3

Relationship Between Shots

For this post, I am going to be examining the highway battle scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction. I chose this clip because I remember being frustrated by the camera angles when I first saw it. I’ve embedded the clip below. However, the only YouTube video that I could find is a little bit long, so skip to 2:00 for the scene that I’ll be analyzing here. Everything before that is just a long chase scene filled with explosions noises, and dizzying camera movement. There’s really not much to say about that part.

At 2:00, we see Optimus Prime (the large red and blue robot) being flung down a road by an explosion. Optimus begins to stand back up, then the camera cuts to Mark Wahlberg’s character calling for his daughter. The camera then cuts back to Optimus. The cuts are very quick and add to the overall feeling of danger and panic.

When the camera cuts back to Optimus, he’s knee deep in a fight with Galvatron (the large silver robot). This is a bad transition because Galvatron comes out of nowhere. We never saw him catch up with Optimus, so this all seems rather sudden. There should have at least been the sound of footsteps so the audience could know that he was coming.

For some reason, Optimus and Galvatron are never in the camera’s focus. Instead they are always in the corner of the screen with a significant portion of their bodies obscured. I’m not sure if this was done to show how big the robots are or to draw attention to the girl running away from them, but it’s very distracting and annoying.

Sometimes, the camera angle is not as bad. There’s one part where the camera closes in on Galvatron’s face when he speaks. It really adds to the effect.

At 3:00, a missile comes out of nowhere and hits Optimus. Optimus moves in slow motion as he gets hit. The tone of the scene changes dramatically. Dark clouds fill the sky and the music changes to a slow, ominous orchestral piece. Lockdown, the robot who fired the missile, calmly walks onscreen. This scene is better edited than the last one. We get a good shot of Lockdown entering the fray and the camera focuses on him when he starts speaking to Optimus. I also like how the use of shadows and the color black

Project 2

For my second project, I interviewed my classmate Andy. The sound is a little soft, so i suggest wearing headphones.


Sequence 04 from optomasprime on Vimeo.