Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition
Page 45
neo-noir
suspense
deviant plot
plot
structures
point of view
SUGGESTED READINGS
Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999).
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).
John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974).
Syd Field, The Screenwriter’s Workbook (New York: Delta, 2006).
Avrom Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
Barry K. Grant, Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
Andrew Horton, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
George M. White, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
286
Visual Effects
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
■ describe the roles that visual effects play in
■ distinguish between male and female
cinema
mattes
■ explain what a composited image is and its
■ describe the role of forced perspective
relation to visual effects
■ explain what an optical printer does
■ describe a travelling matte
■ explain rendering and multi-pass compositing
■ describe the Schufftan process
■ describe how stereoscopic cinema works
■ distinguish between rear and front projection
■ explain the role of a stereographer
■ explain what a Z-depth map is used for
From Chapter 8 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
287
Visual Effects
Many of cinema’s most artistically significant and many of its most popular films feature an intensive use of visual effects— Citizen Kane (1941), Metropolis (1927), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), North by Northwest (1959), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Visual effects are an essential structural component of cinema, enabling filmmakers to create worlds of the imagination and to overcome the limitations of time, budget, and place.
A filmmaker must visualize the world described in a story and place it upon the screen. Very often, the places and characters of that story cannot be directly filmed because they never existed or they no longer exist or they are inaccessible. The majesty of the ocean liner Titanic belongs to a bygone world, but it can be visualized using models, mattes, and digital animation. An imaginary planet, Pandora, can be created for Avatar (2009). San Francisco no longer looks as it did in the 1960s, but it can be digitally built for a historical drama like Zodiac (2007). The actor Andy Serkis can be transformed into the wizened Gollum or the giant ape King Kong.
To a popular audience, these are examples of “special effects,” and, indeed, for several decades this was the industry’s term for the special photographic effects that were added to a film. The first Academy Award for Achievement in Special Effects was bestowed in 1937. In 1964, the wording was changed to Achievement in Special Visual Effects; in 1972 it became Special Achievement in Visual Effects; and in 1981 it became Achievement in Visual Effects.
The industry still uses the term “special effects,” but it now carries a very narrow and restricted meaning—it designates mechanical effects, such as explosions or physical stunts such as cars flipping over. Everything else that a popular audience would call a “special effect” is today referred to in the film industry as a visual effect , and, accordingly, that is the terminol-ogy that will be used here.
This chapter explains fundamental visual effects techniques, surveys their use throughout the history of cinema, and explains the artistic designs they help to accomplish.
TITANIC (20TH CENTURY FOX, PARAMOUNT, 1997)
Visual effects enable filmmakers to overcome the limitations of time, budget, and place that otherwise would restrict the stories they could film. Matte paintings, miniature models, animation, and other tools allow moviemakers to film imaginary worlds and bygone eras from the past. Without visual effects, there often is no cinema. Frame enlargement.
288
Visual Effects
A COMPOSITED MEDIUM
Cinema is a composited medium, assembled from many pieces of picture and sound.
A composite image or sequence is one that is composed of elements created separately and then combined together. Visual effects are composites; the final image is a layered blend, conjoining different elements—for example, live action, miniature models, matte paintings or animation. Understood in these terms, editing is a visual effect. An edited sequence creates a composite reality by joining together shots that were filmed separately from one another. For example, in Rear Window Jeffries (James Stewart) watches his neighbors across the apartment courtyard when, in fact, actor Stewart saw none of the things that the editing suggests his character can see. In a historical context, editing was one of the first tools filmmakers used to create visual effects.
The first known example occurs in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895). Just before the executioner’s axe falls, the cameraman, Alfred Clark, stopped filming. All of the actors on set froze and held their positions while a dummy was substituted for the actress playing the queen. Filming was resumed, the axe fell, and the head rolled off; when projected on screen, the action flowed in an unbroken and, for the time, shocking fashion.
Stopping the camera to create a hidden cut in the action fast became a popular visual effects technique. Georges Melies used it frequently in his films, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), enabling lizard-like moon people to appear and disappear in puffs of smoke. R.W. Paul’s An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903) uses stop-action substitution to visualize a man run over by a horse-drawn carriage, and Edwin S. Porter in The Great Train Robbery (1903) uses it to switch out an actor with a dummy that is then thrown from a moving train.
Filmmakers quickly devised a repertoire of techniques that enabled a new genre of “trick films” to emerge. These were movies that offered viewers astounding images that contradicted physical reality. In Upside Down, or The Human Flies (1899), a set A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)
Georges Melies was a magician
who turned to cinema for its abil-
ity to create magical effects. He
built his own studio and made
more than 500 films full of trick
effects, perfecting stop-motion
substitution, painted backgrounds,
mirror distortions, perspective
cheats, deceptive camera posi-
tions, and matted images. Melies
today is the most famous visual
effects filmmaker who worked dur-
ing cinema’s infancy. Here, brave
French astronomers gaze at the
city — a painted backing with live
smoke effects — before embarking
on their trip to the moon. Frame
enlargement.
289
Visual Effects
THE ? MOTORIST (1906)
P
roducer Robert W. Paul
made documentaries and his-
torical re-creations as well as
trick films. This delightful fan-
tasy is among his best work.
In the climax, the motorists
circle the rings of Saturn,
courtesy of an animated
miniature and a painted
backdrop. This fast, witty,
and charming film shows
how visual effects stimulated
filmmakers to reach for new
heights of creative expression.
Frame enlaragement.
constructed upside-down and filmed with an inverted filmstrip inside the camera made a group of houseguests seem to cavort and party on the ceiling. In The Cheese Mites, or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901), previously filmed footage inserted into a scene makes doll-sized people appear on top of a restaurant table before the incredu-lous eyes of the diner. In The Clown Barber (1899), a man gets a novel shave when the A RAILWAY
COLLISION (1900)
This R. W. Paul pro-
duction shows how
visual effects served
filmmakers in creating
portraits of a real rather
than imaginary world.
Paul visualizes a train
wreck using miniature
models of locomotives
and the mountain-
ous landscape. Frame
enlargement.
290
Visual Effects
barber removes his head, cuts the whiskers, and then re-attaches the head. R.W. Paul’s The ? Motorist (1906), one of the greatest of the trick films, uses miniature models, animation, painted backdrops, and stop-action substitution in a delightful story of two motorists who drive their car so fast that it flies off into space, circles the sun, and lands on the rings of Saturn.
But it wasn’t only the trick films that used visual effects. Dramatizations and recreations of newsworthy events were very popular with early audiences. Filmmakers used miniature models of buildings, landscapes, and ships to recreate The Battle of Santiago Bay (1898), Windsor Hotel Fire (1899), and Eruption of Vesuvius (1906) and to visualize A Railway Collision (1900).
MATTES
Mattes enabled filmmakers to selectively expose a portion of the frame and furnished one of the most important methods for creating composite images. A matte is a type of mask, a dark or opaque area that blocks light from a film negative and prevents an image from being formed or exposed there. Matting selected areas in the frame enabled filmmakers to combine separately created images to form a composite visual effect.
Using mattes for composites helps prevent double-exposures, super-imposed images where both are visible on top of and through each other.
The earliest mattes were performed in-camera. In The Great Train Robbery , Edwin Porter used mattes to show moving landscapes visible through the windows of indoor sets. In one instance, a passing locomotive can be seen through the window of a telegraph operator’s office. A matte and counter-matte created the composite of the office set with the train in the window. The counter-matte masks the frame in an inverse manner to the matte. The matte/counter-matte system quickly became an established means of creating composite images.
Porter shot the scene’s action—outlaws burst into the office and hold the telegraph operator hostage—with a matte blocking the window area and preventing this part of the film from being exposed. The film was rewound in the camera, and a passing train was filmed using the counter-matte, which blocked the entire frame except for that portion corresponding to the window opening. The composite image that resulted from these two exposures placed the train inside the window of the set without allowing the separate exposures to overlap and create ghosting or a double-image.
Although in-camera matting became less common as filmmakers developed more
elaborate methods of producing composites, some spectacular examples can be found in modern cinema. The second section of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) portrays a landing on the moon by astronauts and their discovery of a mysterious, giant black monolith that suggests the presence of an intelligent, alien life form. Shots of the lunar excavation area around the monolith combine live action (the astronauts) with a miniature model of the moon’s surface. The live action was shot first, and the 65mm negative was left unprocessed for more than a year as Kubrick and his crew worked on other sections of the film. When it came time to film the miniature, it was filmed using the undeveloped live action footage bi-packed in the camera with a counter-matte blocking the previously exposed area (the live action component). A bi-pack camera is capable of running two strips of film, so in this case one strip contained the live action and another the counter-matte. The result was an extremely sharp, clear, in-camera composite image combining the miniature model with the live actors on a set.
291
Visual Effects
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903)
Edwin S. Porter used an in-camera matte to place footage of a passing locomotive in the window of the set depicting the telegraph operator’s office. Filmmakers rapidly seized on the matte/counter-matte system for creating composited images. Frame enlargement.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (MGM, 1968)
Astronauts investigate a lunar excavation site where a mysterious giant monolith has been found. The actors and the excavated site were shot on a studio stage in England and matted in-camera with a miniature model of the rocky, mountainous lunar surface. Frame enlargement.
292
Visual Effects
TRAVELLING MATTES
Cinema is a medium of motion pictures, and matting techniques need to be capable of accommodating moving action. Travelling mattes enable filmmakers to insert moving foreground figures into a landscape or other type of background that has been filmed separately. Accordingly, travelling mattes are an extremely valuable and widely used tool of visual effects. They involve the application of a matte and counter-matte in order to prevent double-exposures. In our example of Superman flying to the rescue, the composite image could be produced using rear screen projection (a technique explained later in the chapter), but we will treat the scene as if produced using a travelling matte.
Christopher Reeve as Superman is the foreground element and has been filmed separately in a controlled studio environment. If we simply printed the foreground and background elements together, they would be double-exposed; Superman would look transparent because the desert landscape could be seen through him. Using mattes to selectively expose portions of the composite image, we can prevent this kind of double-exposure.
A male matte is created from the foreground element (Superman, in this case). A male matte, also known as a holdout matte, is a black silhouette of the foreground element with all other areas of the film frame being transparent. The opaque silhouette will block light from being transmitted through the film in this area during printing (or, if working digitally, during compositing). A female matte (also known as a cover matte) must also be created as the inverse of the male. The female matte is an opaque frame in which the foreground figure is transparent. The opaque area of the female matte will block light during printing.
Several steps are needed to produce the final composite image. The background element (the desert landscape) is printed together with the male matte. The new strip of film that results shows the landscape now with a “black hole,” an area without an image that corresponds with the foreground figure. Using the female matte, we can now print our foreground figure of Superman onto the landscape footage that was printed with the male matte. The foreground figure fits into the black hole, and the female matte prevents additional light from hitting the previously exposed area of background.
The resulting composite image shows Superman flying across a desert landscape.
Filmmakers developed numerous methods for generating male and female
mattes. The earliest was the Williams
Process, patented in 1918, which involved filming the foreground element against a black background and then copying the resulting image onto high contrast black-and-white film to generate a male matte. The process did not at first employ a female matte, but Williams refined it to include one, at which point it was known as the Williams Double-Matting process. It was used extensively in King Kong (1933) to combine the miniature model of Kong, animated using stop-motion, with live action footage. An example is Kong’s dramatic appearance inside the enormous gates of the compound on Skull Island. Kong is the moving foreground element (though in the shot’s composition he appears in the background) matted into the live action set and crowd of extras.
Most travelling matte processes used colored light to generate the male and
female mattes because color can act as a filter, useful for blocking or transmitting light. The first of these, developed in the late 1920s, was the Dunning-Pomeroy Self-Matting Process. It used orange and blue light to create an in-camera matte for compositing foreground and background and was employed on Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) as well as King Kong (1933). Subsequent processes using blue-screens to 293
Visual Effects
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
SUPERMAN II (WARNER BROS., 1980).
Principles of travelling mattes. A. Foreground element is shot in a studio against a colored backing and is then extracted from that backing. B. Male matte is produced from the foreground element. C. The male matte is composited with the background image to produce a “black hole” (an area with no picture information) into which the foreground element will be inserted. D. The male matte is inverted to produce a female matte. E.
Using the female matte, the foreground element (A) is composited into the background footage (C) to produce the final composite (E). Frame enlargement.
separate the foreground element or, alternatively, a yellow screen, developed from the 1930s onward.
All of these travelling matte systems tended to leave artifacts in the composited image. Visible matte lines, such as a black or colored line around the foreground figure, pointed to the join between composited elements. Registration was sometimes imperfect, visible as a noticeable jiggling or wiggle between the elements. Color fringing might occur around fine areas of detail such as hair, produced by colored light from the background screen bleeding through porous or sheer areas of the foreground object.