PRACTICAL EFFECTS

   Last week I finished filming my short film, "Scream for the Whisperer". In that film, there is magic and telekinesis, and lots of awesome things that can be really really hard to do on film. What kind of things am I talking about? There's air distortions, objects summoned to people's hands, doors that open and shut on their own, just to name a few. There are a number of ways that these effects can be accomplished, but the methods can be categorized into one of two categories: Practical Effects and Special Effects.

    A Special Effect is any effect added in after the scene has been shot, either through green screen, 3D models, etc. These can be as simple as atmosphere effects life mist or lens flares, or as complicated as marching armies and collapsing buildings.

   A Practical Effect is any effect that is actually done on camera. There's real mist in the scene, a real building is exploded, the crowd scene really has hundreds of extras.

   Quite often there's a mixture of the two. "The Lord of the Rings" movies are excellent example of this, mixing in digital characters in with their real actors to make the locations and battles feel all the more real.

   My films are not on the same scale as "The Lord of the Rings" (yet) but the principles of how to achieve an effect are still applicable. To make an object move across the room in a film is easier said than done. If you want to go the Special Effect route, you have to make, digitally, whatever object you want to move. Then you have to get your actor to perform with an imagined object and hope that their pantomime turns out looking believable. If you go the Practical Effect route, then you have to figure out just how you're going to move the object without your methods being seen. Magnets, thin strings, hidden motors and the like are all common ways that film makers accomplish this.

   For "Scream for the Whisperer", I knew I wanted to use Practical Effects as much as possible. As such, I began playing around with different ways to accomplish the effects I wanted. In the end I decided on using fishing line to make the objects move. A simple trick I learned years ago for making objects fly into an actors hand is to attach some fishing line to the object and then run that line through a ring that the actor is wearing (make sure your actor is wearing a ring), and then have someone off screen pull the fishing line and, voila, the object flies into their hand. This trick, obviously, only works for smaller objects.

   At times I like to watch a movie and think of ways that I could achieve the same effect. What are some of your favorite movie effects and how would you do them?