"Life is like a box of Chocolate."a tumblelog

From Models to Matte Painting

Models and Matte painting are normally used in movie as they are the inexpensive and practical to produce effects that are impossible to recreate in real world. For instance, in “The Pianoist,” where Adrian Brody was walking out to the street showing all the houses along the end of the street wrecked by bombing. Filmmakers also used forced perspective to give us a false appearance of the size. Like in “Lord of the Rings,” where the director actually planned a precise false perspective that made the audience believes that Gandalf was larger than the house.

In this class, I learnt that with the skill to paint, the quality of the film will be different. People will actually believe that these places do exist. Some examples matte painting would be: “Independence day” where the space ship starts to fly into the sky of America, the fall of the liberty, building at the back was burning, in “Dick Tracy” where they show the full view of the town, in “Raiders of Ark,” the long scale of the warehouse and last but not least, in “Lord of the Rings” the battle against the Uruk-hai.

posted 1 year ago

Optical Effects

I had to admit that this class was the driest and hardest to catch up with. As a pampered audience, who cares to learn how the filmmakers create all the effects in the movie. However, learning how optical effects are essential and important in making a movie, it is actually quite interesting to know.

From the invention of William process to Sodium Vapor process, it is quite stunning to see how these filmmakers try to push the boundaries of the impossible to possible. People at that period of time could not imagine that the filmmakers could create something out of nothing. This refers to the the combination of real-life footage with traditional hand-drawn cartoon characters. Foreground and background was shot on a different layer, allowing different lights (depend of the techiniques) to pass through them, and each layer was being exposed and thus creating a male matte(a black image around a clear foreground) and then positive was made creating a female matte(the inverse of male matte).

Because of their patience to create these effects, it was later, movie like Mary Poppins was brought to the audience in an outstanding performance of these techniques. It was at a later stage, where movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam followed the footstep of Mary Poppins. It was a success.

posted 1 year ago

From hand drawn to digitally made animation

As the world moves, the technology spurred at a fast speed that we can even owned a 3D TV now. This is the same in the animation world. In the past, it was used to be “Disney produced” era, however, with the introduction of computer animation in the 1960, things started to change. William Fetter was credited with the intro to computer animation, his first display work “Futureworld” in the 1976 was an example to the start of this technique.

People around the world also explored the ability of this technique and often screened it at SIGGRAPH to share it. However, it took awhile for the artists trained as animator before the tools of computer graphics were accessible to them. Though in the past, the uses of CG was adopted for the use in visual effects, it was also later integrated into traditional animated films such as Beauty and the Beast and later on, the Great Detective Mouse.

Among the pioneers to explore this technique was Pixar John Lasster. Though in the earlier stage, he worked with LucasFilms, whom later failed to see the potential future of Pixar, he was brought up by Steve Jobs and began on his own. Pixar himself was a man that I admire as he sees potential stories that he can make something out of it and made it big. Though stories like “Up” was not well received by most of the people, but i see the way the story moves on, the camera movements, the flow of the characters, the emotions that you will feel for the characters, is something you will find in other animated feature film.

Points to note that, even though computers will become more advance than now, we shall never forget and neglect the fact that our fore-pioneers had been working endlessly hard, and the efforts that they had made for the future generation to gain what they have now. Artists, animators and etc, should continue firming on their foundation so as to be prepared to face more challenge in the future.

posted 1 year ago