Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Horror Comedy
Little Shop of Horrors is an American musical directed by Frank Oz with visual effects supervised by Bran Ferren. It tells the story of a flower shop assistant that discovers a plant which feeds on human blood. The adventure begins when he keeps feeding the plant and needs to find more bodies to give as food. The plant began the film little and it grew until it was bigger than the shop assistant and wanted to take over the world.
In order to film the plant they developed six different rubber puppets that represented each stage of growth of the character Audrey II, with the last stage achieving a 13-foot height. This massive plant needed 51 puppeteers on set to work all the moving parts. They mostly used special effects to create the scenes, and in one of them they managed to shoot the growth of the plant by using a perspective trick. They placed the plant on a small dolly track hidden by the pot, and pulled the plant, so the closer it got to the camera, the larger it looked.
It was hard to get the puppeteers to make the plant move its lips like humans do, so with the goal of making the plant speak naturally they used both special and visual effects. They realized that by making the movement slower they could achieve a smoother movement, so, in post production, they had to speed up the footage to get it back to normal speed: they shot it in 12 to 16 frames per second, and sped it up to 24 frames per second afterwards. The actors had to lip sync the musical’s songs in slow motion when interacting with Audrey II.
Even though they only used visual effects in a few shots, the movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. The usage of blue screens, nowadays called green screens, was only used in some of the last shots of the movie, when Audrey II takes over New York City, and when they had to reshoot the ending. During the former scene, they’d also used miniatures of the city to achieve a better result.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Horror Comedy
An American Werewolf in London is a British-American film directed by John Landis and was the first film, in 15 years, allowed to be shot in Piccadilly Circus. It tells the story of two American backpackers attacked by a creature in London. One of them dies and the other one wonders if he’s going to become a werewolf when in full moon light.
The make-up done in the movie, directed by Rick Baker, was so impressive that it received the first ever Oscar for Best Makeup. The special effects were done mainly by makeup artists, although they also used puppets, for scenes with skulls, and developed an unique material, for the most iconic scene, in which the main character was transformed into a werewolf. In order to achieve the stretching effect to represent the transformation of a human becoming a wolf, they created fake heads, hands and back, with a mechanism they called “change-o”, that physically distorted the body part into a different shape. Latex wouldn’t be stretchy enough, so they covered the fake body parts in an exclusive material that dissolved over time after the movie was recorded. They believed that by doing it this way they would be innovating in the industry, since transformation sequences were always done by overlapping scenes with different makeups.
There’s a part of the movie where David, the main character, walks through crowded streets of London already transformed into a four-footed werewolf wreaking havoc. In order to film that scene they built a wolf costume on top of a metal wheel structure, and had an operator lay on the structure and put his arms in the costume to simulate the wolf’s paws movement. They couldn’t show the werewolf’s back leg, because they made only the front part of the costume.
Here are two videos with making of scenes of the movie.
Total Recall (1990)
Total Recall is an American epic science fiction movie directed by Paul Verhoeven and visual effects supervised by Eric Brevig. The movie is set in 2084, when the main character starts having troubled dreams about Mars. He suddenly realises he is involved in espionage on Mars, and can’t tell if what he is living is real or implemented memories. The film relied on both special and visual effects and had one of the most expensive productions made at that time, having a budget of around 55 million dollars.
Total Recall was one of the last movies to make usage of miniatures. One of the most memorable puppets was the Kuato puppet, which served as a bodysuit for an actor and required fifteen puppeteers to control the prop. They also relied on miniatures to create the scenes where Mars Mountains were being blown up.
The movie was also one of the first ones to use CGI, being a pioneer in using the technique of motion capture. The artists had the challenge of creating a sequence which appeared to be a real X-ray that would follow the actors anatomy and perform the movement accurately. They used a software called Power Animator, that was used for choreography, and combined it with their own render software. For the motion capture, the actor used a body suit with 18 reflective bulbs, while walking behind tempered glass painted in black. Eventually the software broke down, and the animators had to animate the sequence frame by frame.
Gremlins (1984)
Horror Comedy
Gremlins is an american movie written by Chris Columbus and directed by Joe Dante. It tells the story of a young man who gets, as a christmas gift, an unusual pet that destroys stuff when exposed to light, gets wet, and/or eats after midnight. Mogwai, the strange species never seen before, gave spawn to other creatures.
The special effects used in the movie relied on rubber puppetry, and were used to perform Gizmo, the main Mogwai character, and other creatures. Some of them were mechanical, while others needed puppeteers to be manipulated; for that, they made sets built up off the floor. Also, they made marionettes for a few Mogwais, but these weren’t too convincing when filming close-ups; for this situation, they built large ones with more details on the face. For the iconic scene where a Gremlin explodes in the microwave, they popped a balloon that was allowed to burst.
The Abyss (1989)
Science Fiction
The Abyss is an American movie directed by James Cameron with visual effects supervised by Bran Ferren. It tells the story of a diving team that has a mission of searching for a nuclear submarine that has sunk in the deepest waters. It won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects using a CG model to characterize a water tentacle. They also relied on special effects, recording submersible in a tank that was the size of eleven Olympic swimming pools.
The film takes place in the deepest water of the Atlantic Ocean, so almost all the scenes had to be shot underwater, and in order to make that possible, the director, James Cameron, filled an abandoned nuclear reactor with 7.5 million gallons of water. They also had to make the lighting in the big pool look like the lighting in the ocean, and to mitigate this they filled the giant place with black beads to control the light’s reflection and saturation; in that way, the light would only pass through small areas. Also, for other shots they used a secondary smaller pool, like in the scene where two heroes collide. For these scenes they had to build miniatures of the submarines, and film them colliding.
In the matter of visual effects, the director chose to work with ILM giving a brief of two aliens that were heavenly and weightless and storyboards of the shots he wanted to produce. ILM created a CGI creature that looked like a pseudopod to be used in only a one minute scene.
In the story, the alien mimicked the characters facial expression, and to do that, they had to scan the actors faces using a 3D software. When the scene was shot, the actors didn't have anything to interact with, since the tentacle creature was added after by computer graphics.
To film the movie they used both Panavision System 65 Camera and ARRIFLEX 35 BL Camera.
Independence Day (1996)
Independence Day is an American epic science fiction movie directed by Roland Emmerich and visual effects supervised by Volker Engel. It tells the story of distinct groups of people migrating to the Nevada desert while the world is under attack by an extraterrestrial race. Winning an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, the film includes 430 VFX shots and relies heavily on practical effects using many miniatures.
More than 90 percent of the movie was done using miniatures, including the scene that became the signature of the movie; the destruction of the White House. As VFX supervisor Engel claims, the scene was also the toughest effect to produce since the miniature was 5-feet tall and filled with great details. Another challenging scene was the one in which they had an explosion coming towards the camera through the streets. When exploding something, fire goes up, but instead, they needed fire to go horizontally. In order to make this scene they hung the building’s miniature vertically, perpendicularly to the explosion, positioned the camera on top of everything and then made the practical blast.
In the movie, aliens are attacking the country and they are shooting towards the creatures using f-18 aircrafts. The director opted to use CGI to develop the airplanes and make the effects. The scene was composed of hundreds of f-18’s flying in the air at the same time, while they were shooting fire, and the aliens were shooting green lasers. They first modelled the airplanes, using a 3D software, and created the effects, including fire, laser and smoke textured particle spheres, and then developed a program in which would simulate the fighting scene so they wouldn’t have to animate each airplane and effect.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Blade Runner 2049 is an American cyberpunk science fiction movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and visual effects supervised by John Nelson. The visual effects work was done by many different studios such as DNEG, MPC, Rodeo FX, BUF, and UPP, while the special effects was based on miniatures done by Weta Digital.
Weta Digital provided practical miniatures sets that contained futuristic buildings that composed the streets. Although the technique of using miniatures has been done for a long time, the studio approached in a modern way. They first model each one of the buildings that will compose the scene in every detail using a 3D computer software. Then they put all the buildings together actually composing the scene, animate the digital camera movement that will be recreated after by a physical camera. When everything is approved, they move to the practical physical part, where they use machinery to read the 3D file and cut the material in the same format as in the digital model. After this part is done, they will glue, paint and put it all together to film the shot.
The most memorable CGI scene is the one which required an actor to be digitally created since the character was a younger version of the actor performing. The scene was first shot by a double body using a suit that covered the whole upper body, only left uncovered their face and neck, which they would replace by the digital face later in post production. They scanned the actor’s face in order to get the 3D information of her bones. They then found a mold of Sean’s face when she was 28 years old and also scanned it to get the 3D wireframe; the target was to make the CGI character look 20. Then, they looked in the old Blade Runner movie and old pictures of Sean to make the model look just right. Finally, they analysed the way Sean moved when young, and inserted that on the CGI model. The two minute sequence was performed with excellence.