Superman

"You'll Believe a Man Can Fly."


After the opening week of "Superman Returns," it seems only fitting that I return to writing for this blog by writing about the original Superman movie(1978).

Among this film's accomplishments was receiving an academy award for it's effects. Director Richard Donner apparently said, just before the film was released: "If we don't believe Christopher Reeve can fly, we don't have a picture."

And so the visual effects team was handed this daunting task, of owning up to the film's moniker, and making us believe a man could fly. To accomplish it, several then-state-of-the-art technologies were employed to make our hero fly. Three main technologies were used: Bluescreen, Wire (rig) removal, and the Zoptic Process.

For the Bluescreen shots, one of the challenges faced was the fact that Superman's costume included lots of BLUE. A Blue costume on a bluscreen shot will disappear into the background, and that is precisely the problem they faced. In the end, the costume department had to create a new set of costumes with blue-green replacing the blue portions, so that the costume would not disappear into the background. If you watch the movie again, and look closely, you can always tell which shots are bluescreen because Christopher Reeve's costume changes from blue and red to Blue-green and red. These shots, even with the latest optical compositing technology of the time, still had blue-spill, and edge artifacts that can certainly be spotted by today's audiences. Regrettably, these shots don't stand the test of time very well, but the two other processes I'll be talking about are a different story.

For some shots, Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder were suspended by wires on set, and those wires were usually meticulously removed optically. It was an incredibly laborious task, involving using an optical printer or projector to rotoscope the wires (draw around them frame-by-frame), photographing those rotoscope mattes, and using them in the optical printer to print clean frames over top of the wires. The process could take take hours, sometimes days, just for a single shot. Each shot might involve shifting previous or subsequent frames to match the current frame, and using the hand-drawn mattes to print those clean-frames over the current frame wherever the wires appeared. I must say, even after nearly 30 years, these shots certainly hold up.

Another process, and the focus of this article, are the Zoptic shots. Rear Projection had been known and used for decades at the time and front projection was in it's infancy. Front projection is a more complicated procedure (than rear-projection), requiring that a projector bounce it's image off of a half-silvered mirror onto a scotch-light screen. What's a Scotch-light screen? Basically, any light that hits it will be reflected directly back to it's point of origin. If you've ever noticed a bicycle at night because of the reflection of your car's lights in the pedals, you've seen the effect of a scotch-lite-like material. If the camera is set up at JUST the right spot, the light rays from the scotch light screen will bounce back through the beam-splitter to only one spot, DIRECTLY into the lens of the camera. Now, put something, or someone, in front of the screen, light them JUST RIGHT, and it appears that the plate shot, projected by the projector, is happening behind them.

If rear projection and front projection seem antiquated technologies, remember that rear projection was used as recently as Terminator 2 and The Matrix, and front projection created the incredible shot of Harrison Ford jumping off the bus just as a train hit it in The Fugitive.

Back in the late 70's, while the pioneers of Front projection were still working out it's intricacies, a man by the name of Zoran Perisic had bigger plans. He realized that if he locked the zoom lenses of the projector and the camera together, he could create a very special illusion. Not only did the actor in front of the screen seem to be inside the projected shot (the "plate shot"), s/he also could appear to be coming towards, or receding from the camera, all without the actor even moving...

The applications of the Zoptic process may have been few, but Zoran Persic realized that they could help Director Richard Donner create the illusion that a man could fly. For instance, take a camera on a helicopter, point it at the ground, and fly straight up into the sky. What do you get? You get a plate shot, looking down, in which the camera flies up. Speed it up a little, and now project it, through the Zoptic process, to appear behind our hero, and it appears that he has started on the ground, and flown up at great speed along with our camera.

As another example, take a camera on a helicopter, and shoot out the side of the helicopter as it moves past a bunch of skyscrapers. Then project that through the zoptic process to appear behind our hero as he is suspended, facing the direction of the helicopter movement, and he appears to be flying along, among the skyscrapers.

So far this is just plain old Front Projection, but now we add the magic of the Zoptic process. Shoot (from a helicopter) a shot as if we, the camera, were moving backwards. Now project that behind our hero. So far he's staying still on-camera while the background flies away from him. It still looks like he, and the camera, are flying, but his size on camera never changes. Now comes the magic bit. Zoom in with the camera, while at the same time, zooming the projected image to match. As far as the camera is concerned, the projected image has not changed size, but the ACTOR seems to be getting closer and closer (because we're zooming IN on him). On the Zoptic set, the actor has never moved, but through the lens of the camera, he seems to be getting closer and closer to us, and all the while, the background projected image seems to stay the same size.

One of the many compliments I can give the film is that even to this day (nearly 30 years later), the Zoptic shots still look VERY impressive. I know I will be heckled to no end about this, but to my mind, these shots even look better than most current digital shots, which to my eye still look rather fake.

One of the many lessons to be taken from Superman the Movie begins with a quote from a technician, one of the many people involved in the creation of the Zoptic process Shots, speaking of Christopher Reeve:

"Nobody else can fly. When you put stand-ins and stunt men... [in front of the camera]... they look nothing. They just lie there. When he gets up there, he flies. You believe he can fly, because he believes it. He's prepared himself in his own mind because he's an actor. No matter how long the shot takes, he's so patient. It's really hot and uncomfortable up in that thing. He's amazing that guy."

As we enter an era in which an entire movie can plausibly be shot on a blue-screen stage (it was done for the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), it will become increasingly difficult for actors. They now have nothing to which they can react. They are merely told by a director "OK, the dinosaur is running after you now..."

Remember that once you get into the post suite, what you see on film (or High-Def Video) is what you get. There's no dial in the visual effects suite labeled "acting" that can turn up it's quality. We saw Christopher Reeve fly as Superman because he SOLD it. Because HE believed it, and he made us believe it.

The lesson for directors is simple: get actors who can ACT. I love Visual Effects (as you can no doubt tell), and I will tell you this: the fanciest, most spectacular visual effects in the world cannot rescue a movie with a bad plot, bad writing, or bad acting (no matter what Joel Schumacher tells you).

The lesson for future actors: practice reacting to nothing. Find the child in you, the one who remembers play-acting as though a dragon were chasing you, and let that child play again.


If you're intersted in the zoptic process, read an excellent article about it on supermancinema.co.uk


THE MOVIE ITSELF:
What can I say? It's superman... Wonderful, magical, simply excellent. I admit on viewing it again recently that there are parts that drag a little, but how else do you develop the plot and characters? About my only criticism is the "Can you read my mind" voice-over, which I always thought didn't work.

Star Wars: A New Hope

Star Wars: A New Hope
(1977)

The Star Wars empire of George Lucas began in 1977, with the epic's fourth episode, "A New Hope." In this installment I'll be talking about the original 1977 release. I'll be covering the re-releases of episodes 4-6 in a special installment coming soon.

The film used nearly every visual effects trick in the book at the time, ranging from the simplest "Flash Frames" like those used in "Le Voyage dans la Lune", to then-state-of-the-art complicated motion control camera shots and optical composites.

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SLOW-MO ALERT:
If you watch closely during the final battle sequence you might notice a point-of-view shot in which the camera seems to fly down and into the trench (this same shot is actually used a few times). If you watch it again frame by frame, you might notice a frame where the entire screen goes white. If you look even more carefully, you will notice that the towers and structures around the trench change from before the flash to after the flash. This is because the flash frame was used to mask a transition from one size of model to another. A smaller model was used for the first part, and much larger and more detailed trench model was used for the last part.
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While optical printers (used for optical compositing) had been used before, they had never been used to such precision, nor to such an extent. Motion Control photography is the use of computer controlled cameras to precisely reproduce camera moves, and became the single most important technological leap (other than optical printers) used in the creation of the visual effect for the film. Similar camera control had been achieved mechanically before, but had never been done with computers, or with such flexibility of camera movement. No such technology existed at the time, and so the visual effects artists had to invent it. So ubiquitous a technology was Motion Control Photography for the creation of visual effects, that it is still a staple of visual effects to this day. The technology has improved substantially, but the basic idea of reproducing camera moves with extreme precision from one take to the next has remained the same.

"Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope" (herein called "ANH") stands as a testament to what can be done with optical compositing. With the exception of some full-scale models shown on land, every ship shown on screen was a model that had to be shot as a separate blue-screen element, and optically composited with a background element. Sometimes it was not this simple (though no optical composite is ever simple), some shots required numerous elements, each with it's own matte(s), requiring endless passes through the optical printer.

"ANH" was a turning point in the evolution of movies, but it was a turning point for visual effects as well. Visual effects had been made almost exclusively by the effects departments of major movie studios. Visual effects companies as such were unheard of at the time, but George Lucas had assembled some of the youngest, brightest, and best talent in visual effects together. Most of them were fresh out of school, and Lucas presented them with the opportunity of a lifetime. The bulk of them describe working on Star Wars as some variety of playground, where kids got together to make and blow-up model space ships.

At the end of post-production the bulk of The company's crew spread to the four corners of the earth, assuming that with the completion of Star Wars, the crew was to be disbanded. None would have guessed that they would be called back, and that their expertise was soon to be drawn upon by some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
And so the largest, oldest, and most accomplished visual effects company of all time, Industrial Light and Magic, was created. ILM is still an industry leader to this day, though many of the original artists left to create their own companies, or pursue other interests.

Copies of the original film in all it's optical glory (before the addition of digital improvements for it's re-release) are rapidly becoming difficult to find, though VHS copies are still available to rent at some video stores. The very best copies of the original film are the Laserdiscs, though copies of them (and Laserdisc players in general) are becoming extremely rare.


*** Update to the Above ***
If you want to see the originals in their optical glory, and without the digital "improvements," you now have a great new option. For as long as they last, you can buy (and maybe rent) the original trilogy on DVD, each with the digital re-release on the first disk, and the original version on the second disk. Just make sure you get the versions with "LIMITED EDITION" along the top, NOT the SPECIAL edition.

And where did they get get the excellent-quality video for these versions? You guessed it... the Laserdiscs!
*** 23 July 2007 ***

THE MOVIE ITSELF: Fantastic, even to this day, and after many viewings. One of the many great things about this film (and most of the septilogy) is that it is family friendly. Children and Adults seem to enjoy it equally.

Welcome To It

Welcome to the blog. I used to be in the movie industry, working in visual effects. There's no jobs now, well there are, but not a career. You can work in the movie industry in Canada, as long as you don't mind looking for work every 3 months or so. The thing is, I didn't know how important job security was to me until I didn't have any.

So I'm back in school in the medical field, trying to use these film and computer skills I have in another way. I don't think I'll ever get the movies (or more importantly my love of Visual Effects and it's rich history) out of my head, so here I am on blogger.

I am intending this blog to be a list of 365 of the most influential and important visual effects movies of all time, and WHY they are so. The little blurb about each one might be only a paragraph, or maybe a few. I might even write a little novel about the really big ones. Think of it as a year-long visual effects school, one movie at a time.

Because of copyrights (and my respect for them) I likely won't include any pictures, but I will try to include a link to IMBD.com for each one. Being a student, I likely won't be adding a new movie every day (sorry, have to study and all).

These are my thoughts and intentions as of today, and I will be very interested to read this post again in about a year's time, to see how all of this evolves.