There’s actually no such shot in WoO. Everything’s shot in either sepia or color, but not both. The one scene where Dorothy emerges from the house after it’s landed, they simply painted the interior of the house the sepia color and had her dark silhouette obscure the color in her dress until she emerges into the light of Munchkinland.
In The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s home lands in Munchkinland, she’s still in black and white, so no need to repaint the interior of the house. Dorothy walks to the front door. . . At that point a new reel begins, and the film stock changes to color with the closeup of the darkened front door opening upon a brilliantly lit landscape. The light is so low inside the house that repainting the door may not have been necessary. On the DVD they’ve eliminated the flashing circles in the upper right corner of the image that signal a reel change, so you’re even less aware of at which point the “seam” occurs.
For the return to Kansas, there’s a double exposure of the color closeup of Dorothy repeating “There’s no place like home” with the black and white shot of the Gale home swirling down upon the camera, and then fade out. End of color reel. The next reel is black and white, and fades in with Dorothy in bed.
Well, sorr-eee… ya nitpickers.
I said it was a “cheap-ass” method.
Hm. Calls to mind Calvin’s dad, explaining how the whole world used to be black and white, but the pictures stayed that way. Clever cinematography, though. Sometimes it seems like computers have taken all the fun out of special effects.
Just to continue on with the Forrest Gump conversation a moment …
I saw a documentary on special effects in film a few years back, and one of the things mentioned were the sneaky special effects in Forrest Gump. One of the effects that almost no one notices (and which, therefore, is tremendously successful) is a small scene with Gary Sinise on the shrimp boat. He gets out of his wheelchair, sits on the boat’s rail, swings his legs over and drops into the ocean.
Since he’s not in the chair, they used the blue socks on his lower legs to map out the area they would digitally remove in post-production. However, in the scene he swings the stumps of his legs over the boat’s rail. Since Gary Sinise’s legs don’t stop at his knees, his lower legs would normally bump into the rail if he tried this maneuver.
So they cut out a section of the rail for his legs to swing through. They digitally replaced that section in post-production.
Sneaky. And very cool.
Why do they use “blue” or “green” screens. Is there something magical about the color blue or green (like #2 pencils) or did someone just pick that color and everyone else ran with it?
This is a basic explanation of how blue-screen (and similar methods) work.
I heard somewhere that in movies like Matrix: Reloaded and Blade II: Electric Bugaloo they combine the regular footage with Bullet Time camera rig shots and full CGI shots so that the camera can follow the action whereever it goes.
Couple of things that make a scene look fake:
People falling at constant velocity - When they lower a falling stuntman on some kind of wire rig, the motion never looks right. Objects accelerate as they fall. They don’t decend at a constant rate.
CGI characters with unnatural movements that defy physics. Once again: x[sub]t[/sub]=x[sub]0[/sub]+vt+1/2at[sup]2[/sup] people!
[LISA SIMPSON VOICE]Homer! There are effects other than “Lens Flare” and “Motion Blur”!![/LISA SIMPSON VOICE]
For a glimpse at amazing effects done w/ “green screen” effects, have a look at the “Hollow Man” DVD extras. The movie was mediocre, but the effects were impressive. It also talks about using green vs. blue vs. black. Also some of the more impressive CGI of recent years, building a body from inside out.
Here’s one that I think might be specialized, but maybe not. How do they get 3D animation to get the new “cartoony” look? I guess it’s kinda like what’s in the new Spiderman cartoon on MTV, but I’m thinking more about a certain car ad where the “cartoonishness” spins off the screen and is left with a real scene. (That may just be stylized rotoscoping, I don’t know.)
I think you’re talking about “cel shading”, which is just a different set of algorithms to the computer so it draws the 3D models in the “cartoonish” style instead of super-realistic. Mostly it involves reducing the number of colors in the rendered model to a smaller palette, I believe. The Sony PlayStation 2 game Auto Modellista(?) has real-time racing graphics done in the same look.
Re: cel shading: The hard part isn’t reducing the number of colors; the hard part is rendering the black outline that toons normally have.
A link with examples here:
http://www-evasion.inrialpes.fr/people/Philippe.Decaudin/Cartoon.html
Cel shading is interesting because it’s actually more difficult/computationally expensive to make something look “simple” than it is to make it look realistic!
Speaking of Discreet products, the new version of 3DS Max has a Cell Shader. A lot of “tradtional” animation uses cell shading these days.
How did they do the semi-invisible effect in Predator?
The cel shader that is integrated into 3ds max 5 is Ink&Paint, which had previously been a free plugin from blur studio (www.blur.com/blurbeta/). The car commercial mentioned in a previous post was also done with 3ds max and a free plugin, SimCloth.
Most major 3D programs either have cel shading built in or available through a free/commercial 3rd party add-on. There are even tricks that don’t use a dedicated “toon” software to achieve the same look.
Regarding Bullet-Time, it always reminds me of the video for “Midnight Mover” by Accept. Anyone remember that? mid-80’s? The band is on a central stage and there are cameras all around and each frame is shot by a different camera in a circular pattern. Very strange effect.
Yeah? One of the big reasons I want to get Mac OSX is to DL Maya’s free version. I wonder if it has cel shading…
Thanks guys! Really making me want to get more into 3D design.
You can actually use any colour at all, but there are reasons to use blue or green.
Blue is used, because it is a colour that doesn’t appear in human skintones or hair, under most lighting conditions. Then they use a particularly bright electric shade of blue so that things like blue eyes or the sky aren’t necessarily affected.
However, that is not foolproof, and normally what they use if there is much blue in the shot (clothing, sky, whatever) they use green instead, again a very bright electric shade. James Cameron likes to light his scenes in blue (cf Terminator 2, Titanic, Aliens) so he uses greenscreen during those kinds of effects shots.
The last resort, especially when these effects were composited optically, is to rotoscope (draw outlines around objects) and use these to matte out parts of the image that won’t be affected by the bluescreen keying. e.g. If the Green Goblin is against bluscreen, the blue colour found in green will render him partially transparent when they overlay the background plate. So they draw a careful line around Gobby and fill it with black and use it as a holdout matte that will not be affected by the overlay.
These days compositing is all done digitally, with advanced tools and computer-aided-guesswork, so it’s much easier to matte and composite without the strict need for perfectly even bluescreens, for rotoscoping large areas of holdout mattes, etc. But tradition, and certain technical reasons, they still do things in certain ways just because they’re in a transitionary stage, and software has been designed to imitate the way that it used to be done.
I may be off on some of my details, so please correct me if I am.