I was re-watching The Road Warrior today, and the scene with the failed truck scavenge attempt by the refinery folks got me thinking about film F/X.
After the one dune buggy is wrecked and the outlaws have captured the pair, our main antagonist shoots one of them with a wrist crossbow. There’s a fairly nice shot of the guy with no arrow in him, and then there’s an arrow in his chest (see here at about 2:35). It certainly looked like he was shot with an arrow, but I figure Australia cares more for its actors than to dispose of them so readily. So I’m wondering, how did they do that?
I had gym teacher in high school who had come here to the US from England. He and a friend had been gymnasts in college there, and in the '50s had a hard time finding jobs after graduating. A movie was being filmed at a castle in England, and stunt men were supposed to get shot with arrows in the chest and fall backward off the rampart onto some pads. They put a thick cork pad on their chest under the costume, and someone would shoot the arrow at them from just outside of the frame. Stunt experts would fire the arrows with just enough force to penetrate the cork pad. The local stuntmen hired to do the job kept messing up the shots by looking back over their shoulder as they fell. Someone on the set suggested hiring gymnasts from a local school, and there they found my gym teacher and his friend. The two of them did all the arrow shot stunts and a lot more for the movie. They used the money they made to come to the US, where they found work as gym teachers.
Well, there’s no real way to miss the shot in the OP, that’s pretty much point blank.
I don’t know if that’s still how they do it in Hollywood these days of high CGI, but it’s the method Akira Kurosawa used when filming* Throne of Blood*: at the end, when Toshiro Mifune is shot to death with hundreds of arrows, the ones hitting him were harmless bamboo fakes, fired with just enough force to embed themselves in the armour and the padding behind it.
The famous, final one was really shot just behind him perpendicular to the shot so that it looks as though it hits him, then he had to stand very still while a fake one was attached to his neck and the shot was spliced later so that it looks like the arrow goes right through.
All of those that embed themselves in the oaken walls around him however ? Well, the stunt guys couldn’t find a way for safe, fake arrows to stick into hard wood. So they used 100% real, metal tipped ones fired at full draw by a squad of marksmen just off camera, with instructions from the director himself to “aim as close as possible”.
That’s why Mifune’s look of terror is so convincing. He was really pissing his pants, because Akira Kurosawa was one crazy son of a gun.
No particular cite, but I have seen a few films where the arrow was guided to its target by sliding along on a thin wire. Presumably this would eliminate or reduce the chance of the arrow hitting somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, like someone’s face. :eek:
One way of doing it (amongst many others, apparently) is to have a nylon (hence not visible) thread attached to the target. The thread then go through a special arrow with a hole in it and is attached (or more simply held) somewhere behind, out of view. This way, the arrow follows the thread, both slowing it for a weak impact (the “victim” nevertheless wears padding) and making sure it will hit exactly where it is intended. The thread is then quickly cut (behind the archer).
This is used with a live audience who can see the archer, the guy he’s shooting at and the flight of the arrow, but in the case of a movie, obviously, you could use a ton of more convenient tricks.
(Add a pocket of fake blood between the garnment and the padding for a more striking effect. Generally to be avoided since the public doesn’t like to see blood, plus you can’t have it explode as you could with a fake gun shot that would cover the noise, so it won’t be really noticeable)
One of the easiest and safest tricks to do this, also used on stage live, is for an arrow to be spring-loaded, flush with the person’s vest to start (a vertical position). Upon cue, it springs into a horizontal position, pointing into the body. This can happen so quickly that motion film often won’t pick it up, and even if it appears in a frame or two, the frame(s) can be deleted.
Couple that with an arrow released from a bow, then a cut to the victim, it looks quite realistic.
Yep. If you pause just before and really quickly press play/pause to frame-by-frame it (or if you have nothing else to do you could rip the video and slow it down in a video editor), the arrow clearly emerges out of his chest in that shot.
Of course, nowadays it would be virtually guaranteed to be done with CGI.
And of course there’s low-tech arrow trickery. I should think that the most common way to handle this kind of thing is to use cutaways and combinations of long shots and close-ups spliced together to make it appear as if you’re watching one thing happening, when you’re actually watching different things that happened at different times. Our minds naturally put it all together and create the illusion.
I’m a practicing Digital Compositor and visual effects supervisor…
Nowadays this would be done (on high budget features) with a combination of a live action squib (small charge that would safely explode under clothes) to create a burst from a fake blood bag and then a CG arrow and extra blood elements added digitally in post production.
If you’re talking about Mad Max 1, that was from the time before cheap CGI, so it’s probably practical and done as described above (in camera).
