IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

Willy Van der Linden showed me this clip about the special effects in the TV Show Boardwalk Empire. We have all seen green-screen work before, but seldom on this scale. Here the creative team have been willing to think BIG.

So what are we waiting for?

Most tv and film productions use that technique these days - it's 'matting' more than green screen although green screen is used in places as you can see in that demo. The editor I use is capable of handling it - not surprisingly, its the editor they use for most Hollywood productions. However, there are also specialist pro software packages designed for handling mattes - we had a demo of one at OVFM from a speciale effects company that does stuff for screen and BBC. The difficult thing (I find) is getting the size and perspectives of the matte inserts right.

Indeed, what are we waiting for? Mike is one of the only filmmakers who uses special effects in his magical one minute movies. They can be used as excellent intermezzi at dinner parties and film shows. "Remote Control" is a good example. I always enjoy it very much. It's never boring even after having shown it one hundred times. I watched it again after having typed "Remote Control" in "google.uk". Fantastic!

Thanks Willy - you make me blush!

To save the Google search, you'll find that one on my YouTube page (the channel is MikeGShaw - not Mike Shaw!), or more directly, here

Incidentally - no one has ever yet noticed or pointed out that Remote Controls do not make a 'clicking' sound as shown in the video!

Mind you, they don't change shirt colours either...

+1 for Remote Control. One of my all time favourites.
It's also one of the simplest to achieve (I'm sure Mike won't mind me saying), confirming, as if we needed it, that it's the content that counts.
Yet even the idea is simple.
The genius (sorry if that makes you blush again, Mike) is coming up with the simple idea that makes everyone think "that is brilliant and yet so obvious, I can't understand how no-one's come up with it before". A bit like Paul McCartney's best melodies (I nearly said toons, but I'm not sure he's acclaimed for his animations)

As for the SFX/CGI, it's very impressive when you see how it's done, but we become very blase (can't do e accute) about it very quickly. This is a great disservice to the fine men and women who slave away to get everything looking realistic. It's a shame but it's natural. We see something that looks stunning, realise (or are told) it's CGI and then just shrug it off - "Oh, that's all done in CGI". It's done with computers so we tend to forget that it's done by highly skilled people - it's done by computers so in some way it doesn't count.

By contrast we are much more likely to be impressed by a film where we see that for the battle or crowd scene they used 300 actors, all dressed in Roman outfits or we learn that the ship we see was a 1/12 scale model with some close ups for detail built to 1/4 scale.

In other words, we seem to be much more impressed with reality!

We used to say the same about stuntment ... wow, that looks dangerous, yeah, but it was not the actor, just a stuntman ... as if they were not people doing something potentially lethal.

As for crowds ... I rather like Peter Jackson's story of the computer-generated armies in Lord of the Rings. They were able to give the characters a degree of personality ... and some of them ran away from the battles.

But rhe clip seems to take the replacement of reality much further than before. Sure Debora Kerr in a nun's constume rang the bell against a matt painting of mountains. Sure Andy Serkis plays Gollum and is turned into a monster. But having got used to green-screen for bits of background - and small scenes - this goes way firther.

Actually Dave, based on the presentation we had at OVFM a while back, almost every set you see in almost every TV or film play/drama, is a computer mock up. Even what you might think are easily filmable every day situations aren't filmed on location at all - the 'set' is cobbled together from lots of graphic components. But you don't see them as being 'special effects' - no exploding buildings or cars and so on - just normal everyday situations. And so one doesn't realise that they are really FX. One scene we saw was of a couple on a hillside filmed in broad daylight, which was turned into a night time shot on a bare planet, with two moons and the lights of a derelict 'town' flickering in the distance. Another, of a couple walking down a corridor in an office building - the couple were actually filmed simply walking between two lines painted on the floor of an otherwise virtually 'prop-empty' studio!

Don't believe what you see any more! The camera may not lie (much), but the computer makes it a blatant liar