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The special effects for the computer display in “Escape From New York”
- alan_wade 8y agoOn 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. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=lCv59-y123g&t=0s https://youtube.com/watch?v=lCv59-y123g&t=0s
- crummy 8y agoHere's some great unedited footage from Mad Max: Fury Road, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o
- booleanbetrayal 8y agoAbsolutely surreal. No wonder these scenes were so immersive. Props to all the stunt performers!
- tomcam 8y agoThrilling. I prefer this to the final footage, and I have no problem with CG effects in general.
- CharlesW 8y agoAgreed, 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.
- dpcan 8y agoMakes 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.
- numlocked 8y agoI 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.
- alan_wade 8y agoI doubt it's true in this case. Tom Cruise has done 100+ skydiving jumps, spent 6 months learning to fly a helicopter, and for the canyon battle they had to transport a crew of 150 people to the mountain and back every day using the helicopters. No CGI is that expensive. I think they did it because of the craftsmanship, love for the art, perfectionism, stuff like that.
- joering2 8y agoFor 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.
- yholio 8y agoThat makes very little sense: https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ
- dylan604 8y ago>...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.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoMI Fallout was one of the most remarkable movies I've ever seen just for this fact. Might be my favorite film this year.
- kakarot 8y agoI 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.
- yesenadam 8y agoThanks, 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.
- purple_ducks 8y agoBoth the title and the story of the title of "The Thing" are absolutely brilliant
- rainbowzootsuit 8y agoI'm getting excited for my annual holiday viewing of "THE THING." If you have an opportunity to see the special edition or some other copy with the documentary "Terror Takes Shape" about the background of the movie and special effects it is absolutely worth the hour. Also if you are available June 25, 2022, there is a fan meetup at the location of the filming in Stewart, British Columbia. https://www.outpost31.com/2022 https://www.outpost31.com/2022
- Gatsky 8y agoThe attempted CPR scene is still one of the most surprising things I’ve seen in a movie.
- classichasclass 8y agoIt's the sheer ingenuity of effects like this that impress me to this day. You couldn't just come up with a concept and poot it out in CGI from the bureau render farm. It took a real understanding of the medium and the camera, and when manual animation was needed, a lot of blood and sweat.
- roywiggins 8y agoI'm a big fan of slit-scan: https://vimeo.com/71702374 https://vimeo.com/71702374 As used in Doctor Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fnzcAFy8d8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fnzcAFy8d8
- TipVFL 8y agoI love slit-scan effects, it's such a simple but powerful concept. They're actually really easy to do now in post, After Effects has an effect called time displacement that allows you to displace time on a per pixel level. So to recreate a standard slit scan you'd just supply it with a gradient from black to white, but you can also create even more bizarre effects by mapping the pixels differently. A few months ago I did all the effects for some music videos, and I created multiple effects based on slit-screen. Things like, having the video smoothly break apart into slices where the time moves at different speeds and then smoothly splice itself back together. Another cool effect I figured out: using a blurred copy of the video as the time displacement mapping. This makes everything that's colored similarly move together in time, but out of sync with everything else. I did that effect for a video that was just one long shot, and then I rotoscoped out the performers so they move in regular time and match the music: https://youtu.be/-0zO7Fnqnvs https://youtu.be/-0zO7Fnqnvs I really love old school effects work, they're a constant source of inspiration.
- roywiggins 8y agoVery cool! I did have a go at copying the Doctor Who tunnel effect: http://roy.red/slitscan-.html http://roy.red/slitscan-.html
- TipVFL 8y agoNice, your version of the time tunnel looks awesome!
- neotek 8y agoThat video was fantastic!
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- CharlesW 8y agoNice! This takes me back to my days as a kid when I would pour over issues of Cinefex, which I'm very happy to see is still around. If you enjoyed this, you'll probably also get a kick out of how they made the legendary HBO intro from 1983: https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI
- hazeii 8y agoYes, I just looked it up too because I used to read it when I worked in the SFX business. Pretty sure there's an issue that covers Escape from New York, but couldn't find it in a quick search. http://www.cinefex.com/ http://www.cinefex.com/
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI kept thinking, "ok, and this is where they spent $50k on CGI... nope, huh, also practical."
- jungler 8y agoDiscussions 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.
- bsder 8y agoI'd say that a whole generation of effects people took the Star Wars prequels to heart as to how too much CGI sucks.
- gmueckl 8y agoIt 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.
- glhaynes 8y agoA lot of people seem to love these twitter thread unroller sites, but it's not clear to me what problem they solve (on modern Twitter) and I almost always find the original Twitter thread to be more readable/flexible. For example, in this one, I found it a bit confusing whether a particular paragraph went with the clip above or below it. Anyway, to each their own! Original thread here… @Foone is the best: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066284025600339968 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066284025600339968
- mattnewton 8y agoJust another 2 cents: I prefer the threader version as the main twitter site for me frequently fails to load, bothers me to sign in with full page interstitials, download the app bars, and has many touch areas I can hit to accidentally load random other pages. If anyone replies in the middle of the thread too I have trouble following it.
- flanbiscuit 8y agoThank you for posting the original thread, it's a much better experience, especially on mobile
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thibautg 8y agoTBH I did not know which link to submit. On another submission, someone posted a link to a Twitter thread which was replaced by a link to a "threader" app by the moderators. Here it's the opposite. I personally also have a preference for the link to the original Twitter post. So thanks to the mods for the correction! But all the credit goes to the person who posted the awesome thread on Twitter (@Foone). I only copied the link on HN.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWhat a shame having more than one link is impossible. /snark
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe 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. [1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/windows-10-wallpaper-lights-640x347.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/windo...
- AndrewStephens 8y agoMy 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.
- fein 8y agoI 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.
- new299 8y agoFrom my brief google search, it seems unlikely: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/55hb2h/could_mercury_be_used_as_a_hydraulic_fluid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/55hb2h/could_me... Perhaps taken from some other application of mercury...
- suzzer99 8y agoMaybe they snuck it out of the giant thermometer in Baker, CA.
- hazeii 8y agoHaving 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). Aha, and here's an article about them:- http://hollywoodjuicer.blogspot.com/2008/12/adventures-in-grip-land-cranes.html http://hollywoodjuicer.blogspot.com/2008/12/adventures-in-gr...
- powerlanguage 8y agoIf you find this kind of stuff interesting you may like this blog series on creative development for Moon (2009): http://www.gavinrothery.com/they-never-went-to-the-moon http://www.gavinrothery.com/they-never-went-to-the-moon Lots of interesting insight into production tricks used for a modern low-budget sci-fi film. Including graphic/motion design, sets and visual effects.
- TipVFL 8y agoThe 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 clever, but I don't think it really holds up: https://youtu.be/Md14H_qD8iQ https://youtu.be/Md14H_qD8iQ I always thought that shot looked weird, but I never questioned the wireframes in Escape From New York.
- Doxin 8y agoIt'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.
- corysama 8y agoIn 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.
- gmueckl 8y agoThe 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.
- corysama 8y agoThere’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.
- gmueckl 8y agoThe worst part of it: this is chemical film. Copying degrades image quality. So you want to do every step on a the same strip of film. But make one single mistake and you'll have to redo everything from scratch. Digital compositing is a godsend compared to that process.
- ozmbie 8y agoI watched 2001 in 4K UHD Bluray the other day, and the special effects hold up very nicely.
- berberous 8y agoThis guy @foone that did this tweet storm generally has an excellent Twitter account that everyone reading HN would love. He buys lots of old weird hardware and has interesting threads on them. He’s well worth a follow.
- abootstrapper 8y agoImagine how much easier this great content would be to read as a blog post.
- foone 8y agoFeel free to write it as one! But personally I can only do it this way, as I've got rather bad ADHD. So when I'm writing, it's a choice between "a rambly twitter thread" or "an unfinished never-posted blog post".
- roghummal 8y agoAre you converting "an unfinished never-posted blog post" into "a rambly twitter thread"?
- njharman 8y agoTwitter is a completely shit medium for in depth article like this.
- neotek 8y agoPersonally I much prefer Twitter threads like this to big, long, overly descriptive blog posts. The improvisational nature of the writing, plus the interleaved commentary from other interesting people, make it much more conversational and easy to digest.
- homarp 8y agohis patreon: https://www.patreon.com/foone https://www.patreon.com/foone and why it's nto a blog post: https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128 https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128
- hazeii 8y agoThe 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).
- mensetmanusman 8y agoThat’s fascinating. I’m a researcher working closely with today’s Scotchlite technical team at 3M. They recently developed an ambient black looking material that retroreflects: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170502005233/en/3M-Reinvents-Reflective-Material-Activewear-Carbon-Black https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170502005233/en/3M-... Let me know if you want a sample :)
- hazeii 8y agoThat 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?
- mensetmanusman 8y agoIt is on the market, as C790 Carbon Black. I imagine it is difficult to get small samples as an individual, as 3M typically sells to businesses. May I ask what you were working with said material for?
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- agumonkey 8y agoThe windows 10 background was also CGI free.
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoIn a similar vein: all the graphics from the BBC TV version of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- lostgame 8y agoHow did this change into some awful Twitter thing? I swear it was a solid blog post the first time I clicked on it - totally readable, unlike this...
- pronoiac 8y agoI first saw this story as https://threader.app/thread/1066284025600339968 https://threader.app/thread/1066284025600339968 , which didn't work for some here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524844
- guelo 8y agoI often find Twitter to be an awful platform for viewing images and video because they make it so hard to zoom in or to save it.