Meet the new blog - same as the old blog

This version of my blog is now closed. I've migrated everything over to my new combined blog and website. You can go there by clicking here. What are you waiting for?

Official Graham Edwards blog and website

An evening's Ironing

Saw Iron Man 2 last night. Great fun, especially the rapid-fire banter between Robert Downey Jr and his various co-stars. Sam Rockwell and Mickey Rourke great as always. Could have done with shifting the balance towards the end - less time on the drone army and more on the final confrontation with Whiplash. Best line (from RDJr, referring to Scarlett Johansson): "I want one."

Interesting from a VFX point of view too. Not because it looks fabulous - which it does - but because of the huge number of providers, all under the direction of supervisor Janek Sirrs. It seems to be a real trend in VFX: rather than placing a movie with a single large effects house like ILM (although ILM is credited on IM2), supervisors are spreading the load among the huge number of smaller boutique outfits that are popping up. Given the right kit and a fast internet connection, it's become possible for one guy in his basement to contribute finished VFX shots to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Dig the morphing cityscape ...

... in Alex Proyas's SF-noir-mystery movie Dark City. If you haven't seen this late-90s gem, make up for it now. Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, dancing architecture achieved with some early and beautifully executed CGI, a Matrix-y plot (Dark City predates The Matrix by a year) - what's not to like?

Dig the zero-g pen ...

... in 2001: A Space Odyssey. To make Dr Heywood Floyd's pen float across the shuttle's interior, Kubrick's team stuck it on a piece of glass mounted on a rotating rig. The camera shoots straight through the glass and bingo - all you see is the pen. Of all the still-stunning effects in this SF classic, the zero-g pen's the one that really makes me smile.

Opening the 8mm archive

As threatened, here are a couple of bits of animation from those scratchy old 8mm movies I used to make back in the '80s. Since taking these first tentative steps I've had the joy of producing rather slicker pieces of work using pixels rather than plasticene. But hey, we all start somewhere!

First up is the epic opening shot of Matt Line Tidies Up the Universe, as detailed in my earlier post 8mm planetary approach ...



... followed by the previously mentioned demonic dressing gown from Fever.

Dig the demonic dressing gown

One of my earliest adventures in fantasy film-making was the epic Fever, made in collaboration with my long-time buddy Phil Tuppin. It was a four-minute horror movie made with a Standard-8mm clockwork camera and entered for the BBC's Screen Test Young Film-Makers of the Year competition. And, yes, it actually got broadcast in the Highly Commended category, although they censored the second half for fear it would "give younger viewers the heeby-jeebies"!

The key special effect in this epic is a shot of a demonic dressing gown crawling across a boy's bedroom floor, shortly before throttling said boy (who's lying unconscious in bed with a fever) to death. We did it using good old stop-motion animation. Each frame, I extricated myself from behind the camera, picked my way across the room without disturbing any of the artfully-arranged props, moved the gown the requisite inches, then clambered back out of shot ready for Phil to click the shutter. Our rudimentary lighting apparatus meant all this was done under the searing glare of bare 200W bulbs positioned close enough to our faces to act as sunlamps. Back-breaking stuff, but so rewarding to see it all come to life when we got the processed film back from Kodak a fortnight later – yes, this was pre-video and definitely pre-digital.

Most of the other gown shots were puppeteered with garden canes taped into the arms. But that hero shot of the thing crawling across the floor was a real winner. Once again, sadly, I'm posting before sorting out screen grabs from the DVD transfers of these ancient movies (see my previous post 8mm planetary approach), so stand by for a bumper crop of stills soon!

Dig the forced perspective ...

... in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. How can you not be charmed by the simple trick of putting actors at different distances from the camera in order to make one look bigger than the other? By combining this age-old technique with artful set and prop design and cunning camera moves, Jackson and his crew overcame what could have been a major stumbling block by keeping everything in-camera and avoiding (mostly) tricky post-production effects.

8mm planetary approach

I've always been into visual effects in the movies. I have whole shelves full of ''Making Of' books and a pile of Cinefex magazines that may soon collapse under its own gravity. What better place to recall some of my own humble efforts at emulating the FX masters than this blog?

I made my first SF spectacular as a teenager – along with my good friends Phil and Andy. Called Matt Line Tidies Up The Universe, it was filmed using the miracle of plasticene animation in glorious Super-8mm. The opening shot of Matt Line shows our hero's spaceship (constructed by yours truly out of left-over Airfix kit parts) approaching the planet on which the beautiful Princess Arriflex is being held prisoner by the Evil Lord Multiplane.

In true Cinefex style, I'll tell you how the shot was achieved. We waited until after dark to get a true blackout, then hung the ship on black cotton out in Phil's back yard. We lit it with a single 200W bulb and shot it in the top half of the frame with a slow, steady zoom out. We then (a terrifying process this) took the film cassette out of the camera and wound it back using a temperamental cranking device. Next step was to point the camera at a previously-prepared photo of the Earth from an astronomy book, only we put a red gel over the lens to make it look all alien and, well, red. By positioning the planet in the bottom half of the shot, we made sure it didn't overlap with the ship.

So there you go. A simple double exposure. Stationary planet, judicious use of zoom to give the ship the illusion of movement. Bingo!

I don't visit YouTube much but when I do I'm amazed at the technical skill of some of the amateur film-makers out there. However, nostalgia dictates that I should call the old 8mm generation to arms and celebrate the good old days. Don't get me wrong, I've done my share of animation using CGI software and non-linear editing. I love the new ways. The joke is that half the rigs I've built in 3DSMax are virtual replicas of the kind of string-and-sealing-wax affairs we used to build in the old days.

More 8mm FX memories to come include the Demonic Dressing Gown, Tyrell Corp Homage and What Bleach Does To Kodachrome. If you're lucky, I'll dig out some stills!

Dig the independent shadow ...

... in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (how much attribution do you need in just one title?). Yes, Gary Oldman's got a wacky hairdo but don't you just love the way his shadow's got a life of its own?

Dig the monoliths ...

... in the curiously compelling 1957 movie The Monolith Monsters, in which your average American B-movie desert burg is threatened by, well, rocks. That's inexplicably self-replicating rocks from a meteor, naturally. Great miniature work.

Dig the starfields ...

... in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, the UFOs are great but check out the gorgeously crisp night skies they're flying through, courtesy of the great Doug Trumbull.

Dig the asteroid field chase ...

...in The Empire Strikes Back. Nuff said.

Dig the daemons ...

... in The Golden Compass. I'm not picking these out because the CGI's good (which for the most part it is) but because they're that rare example of something that not only survives the transition from page to screen, but actually surpasses the original text.

Pullman's central concept in His Dark Materials is that, in Lyra's world, souls exist outside their owners' bodies as companion animals, or daemons. It's beautifully done in the books, but cinematically it's solid gold – the perfect way to see inside your characters' hearts without resorting to voiceover. The movie equivalent of subtext, if you like.

And it works in so many ways. When a character's doing one thing, their daemon might be doing quite another – what a fabulous way to show internal conflict. When someone dies, their daemon disappears in a soundless explosion of light – their soul really has gone to another plane ... or been snuffed out altogether. You even get to have a character soliloquise without it seeming contrived – they just have a conversation with their daemon.

Dig the heavenly court ...

... in A Matter of Life and Death. Models, matte paintings and a healthy dose of Powell and Pressburger's quirky English surreality create a quirky vision of a bureaucratic afterlife.

Dig the tornado ...

... in The Wizard of Oz. All the more amazing when you consider it was a live stage effect, achieved by puppeteering a giant cotton cone covered in Fuller's Earth. No models, no optical, just a dirty great big twister.

Effects that are special include ...

... the back projection work in Aliens. That means the spectacular dropship crash, of course, but look out for the less obviously showy stuff, like the view through the control centre window as the air processor vents steam.

Effects that are special include ...

... Vermithrax Pejorative in the movie Dragonslayer. A stunning pre-CGI combo of animatronics and Phil Tippett's (at the time) revolutionary go-motion. Favourite shot? Looking down a black tunnel for a beat before she bursts from the shadows, mad as hell, lurching along like the biggest grounded bat you ever saw.