For amateur or novice directors, stop motion special effects offer a viable option for both entertaining and artistic filmmaking. While the process can be at times painstakingly tedious, the stop motion technique allows for a story to be told without any real acting talent required, thus no auditions, less paying wages to actors or recruiting volunteer extras, and even better, no actor egos. The most famous form of stop motion is clay-mation, in which clay figures are repositioned frame by frame to create a “flipbook” motion type of effect. Though clay is a popular choice due to the degree to which it can be easily altered, the concept works for any object with movable parts, including Barbies, dolls and action figures. While full stop motion films fall under the category of animation, thus may fall short of authentic directing in the eye of some critics, when done well they can still showcase a visionary’s brilliance and creative flair. Stop motion, and clay-mation in particular, have become staples on YouTube in recent years as comical ideas and storylines can be easily acted out without the need for big budget special effects. After all, even middle-schoolers can afford a couple cans of play-doh on their weekly allowance. The advent of social media and video sharing has catapulted stop motion back into mainstream consciousness. Read entire article.
Throughout the history of film making, directors have searched for a way to easily convey an idea, parallel or theme to an audience without having to come out and explicitly say it in the dialogue or narration. One tool which revolutionized this process is the match cut, or the pairing of two similar objects in both shape and position within the frame across two separate but chronological shots. The match cut allows for the viewer to easily infer the correlation between shot 1 and shot 2, allowing the nuances of the directors overall vision for the film to be interpreted easily and subtly by the audience. Looking back over the past several decades of film and television, the match cut has been used in thousands of instances for several different purposes. Read entire article.
Long before the modern days of Avatar, Lord of the Rings or even Star Wars for that matter, movies and television shows were being made by innovative directors without the big budgets now required to effectively showcase visual effects. This doesn’t mean the scripts they were putting on screen were devoid of the imagination that might require such illusion. As a means of coping, arguably the oldest visual effect in cinema history sprung out of a cheap camera trick: locking off. Locking off, though it probably was discovered as more of an accident than an innovation, actually played a crucially important role in the development of modern day cinema by altering viewer expectations to include even the seemingly ridiculous. Though it would not fall into the same category as say the believable effects of big, blockbuster movies, locking off provided an easy way for sitcoms and comedies, particularly those of the black and white era, to provide humor through magic and fantasy. In other words, locking off revolutionized the directors repertoire in a time when either technological or budgetary limitations would’ve otherwise siphoned creativity. So what is locking off exactly? Read entire article.
Despite what entertainment media may have repeatedly bludgeoned into your head, forced perspective is not just a what-could-have-been look back over the career moves, personal choices and fashion faux pas of a fallen from grace Hollywood star. Forced perspective is an optical illusion that is often used to create visual effects in movies, saving time in constructing large scale sets that would use more expensive materials. It is not a concept unique to filmmaking, having long been seen in various forms of art and architecture dating back centuries. Forced perception uses carefully calculated scaled objects positioned according to the viewer’s vantage point in order to manipulate visual perception and achieve a misrepresentation of an object’s relative size, length and or width. The Potemkin Stairs in Odessa, Ukraine, famously captured in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, use a form of forced perspective in order to appear significantly longer than they actually are when looking up from the bottom, but much shorter than in reality when looking down the giant staircase. This is achieved through a series of flat landings between the steps and a varying width from level to level. Modern architecture uses the concept mostly as a form of entertainment particularly in larger than life arenas such as the Las Vegas Strip or Disneyland. Read entire article.