I love Guillermo's work--he's a genius at creating scary but understandable villains and heroes over the course of his filmography. The fact that he's brought his amazing knowledge of what makes us human and flawed into the sphere of giant fighting robots has me thrilled beyond belief about Pacific Rim.
Recently, we’ve seen some buzz about Dolby Atmos, a relatively new movie theater sound technology that gives the illusion that there are an infinite number of audio speakers and channels surrounding the audience. It’s hard to believe we didn’t even have wide-spread Dolby Stereo in movies until Star Wars, and if theaters wanted to play Lucas’s space opera, they had to redo their sound system, or Fox wouldn’t give them the film reels.
Several years prior to Dolby Stereo, studios also experimented with a short-lived experiment in movie sound that’s fun to look back on today: Sensurround. It was a gimmick of its time, because the era of the all-star disaster film was in full swing, and while Sensurround wasn’t as high tech as Lucasfilm's THX or Dolby's Atmos, it did try to make movies feel bigger and more realistic through the sheer power of sound, and perhaps helped pave the way for today’s cinema audio technology.
Sensurround was the brainchild of the late Jennings Lang, a Hollywood producer who knew the power of showmanship. Lang was one of the first to call a film an “event” back in 1974 for Earthquake, and legend has it the idea for the film was based on a true event. Lang was in a movie theater when a real life earthquake happened. Then Lang got the idea about making a disaster film where an earthshaker hits L.A., and it would somehow shake the hell out of the audience as well.
“My dad was one of the last true showmen,” says his son, Rocky Lang. “He realized that movies had to be bigger and more event oriented. He was always trying to find a way to make the movie going experience bigger and better.”
"ATTENTION! This motion picture will be shown in the startling new multi-dimension of Sensurround. Please be aware that you will feel as well as see and hear realistic effects such as might be experienced in an actual earthquake. The management assumes no responsibility for the physical or emotional reactions of the individual viewer."- Theater Notice For Earthquake (1974)
By setting up a series of speakers in the theater, and running a soundtrack with very low tones, an earthquake simulation could be done, and there were cues on the Earthquake soundtrack when the special speakers were to be triggered.
I’m working on an Alien costume. I’ve got the suit. It was built for me, and it’s gorgeous. But I’m making the head myself, and it’s kicking my butt. The problem: I have too much time.
I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving. This is counterintuitive, because complaining about deadlines is a near-universal pastime. When I worked with the amazing sculptor Ira Keeler on the space shuttle for Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, Keeler was always proclaiming, “With a couple more weeks, this could be a nice model.” We’re conditioned to believe that the deadline is working against us. But I’m not so sure.
I’d like the head I’m building to be animatronic. The lips would curl back and the jaws would open and snap out, just like in the movie. I’d also like all of these to be controlled by the wearer’s facial movements. I know how each of these actions should work individually, but I keep getting stumped when it comes to choreographing them all to operate together. And when I’m stumped without a deadline, I tend to let things go. So the head has pretty much sat on my bench for seven months.
Any cursory perusal of a fan/maker forum on the web reveals two distinct kinds of projects: the long, meandering, inconsistently updated but impressively detailed effort and the hell-bent-for-leather, tearing-toward-a-deadline build. Solutions to problems of the first type are often methodical and obvious. Solutions for the second type are much more likely to be innovative, elegant, and shockingly simple.
Invariably, the second type of project is propelled by an upcoming event: Comic-Con, Halloween, or even just a visit to a children’s hospital with the 501st Legion (a loosely knit group of Star Warscostumers). Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you’ll start thinking waaay outside the box.
Meanwhile, my alien head sits there, taunting me, awaiting its resurrection.
FIlm buffs thinking back on the history of digital effects will probably bring up 80s classics like Tron or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which featured cinema's first entirely computer-generated sequence, courtesy of ILM. But if you want to get picky, the use of digital effects in film goes back further than that. All the way to 1973, in fact. Today's CG space battles and green screens galore owe it all to Westworld, written and directed by Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton.
The New Yorker has a fun profile on Westworld's effects, which were, of course, archaic by today's standards. The film was shot on a skimpy $1.25 million budget--small money, even at the time--and only a couple minutes of the film required digital effects. Westworld is set in a sci-fi resort, where visitors can spend $1000 a day to hang out in Medieval World, Roman World, and Westworld, which recreate classic time periods with robots serving as stand-ins for real people. Before the Star Trek holodeck came around, this was sci-fi's best take on recreating a paradise version of the past.
Things go wrong, of course--the robots go haywire, and cowboy Yul Brenner hunts star James Brolin across the resort. He is, in every respect, the proto-Terminator--including his "computer" vision, which is muddy and pixelated. Enter the first digital effect.
Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic wasn't around to whip up snazzy digital effects yet, so "Crichton got a quote for generating the computer imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena," writes The New Yorker. "He was told that the two minutes of footage would cost two hundred thousand dollars and require nine months—both prohibitive. He turned to a maker of abstract films, John Whitney, Sr., famed in art and film circles for his work creating animation with military-surplus analog electronics and motor assemblies. Whitney referred Crichton to his son, John Whitney, Jr., who was eager to follow in his father’s footsteps as an experimental filmmaker, but using computers. He agreed to do the effects in four months for twenty thousand dollars."
Whitney's idea was to divide the film into squares and calculate the average color in each one, blurring them together into what we would now immediately call a pixelated look. But there was another problem: scanning the film back then was no easy task. Whitney found a company that could help him, and spent two months testing out how to play with color and contrast to make the effect work projected on a screen.
The New Yorker writes: "Because Whitney didn’t have a color scanner, the workload was tripled: M.G.M.’s optical department made color separations of the film—one set of black-and-white footage for each of the three primary colors—that he needed to process separately, image by image. The computer processing itself took about eight hours per ten-second sequence."
Star Trek Into Darkness is out today, so AweMe's resident swordsmith Tony Swatton recreates Worf's Klingon Bat'leth from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Swatton had previously made Klingon weapons for Star Trek productions, but never a Bat'leth. Here, he plasma cuts the shape out of a sheet of solid steel, and then refines its edges with a belt grinder. Klingons played a small role in J.J. Abram's first Star Trek movie (the Klingon prison scene was cut out of the theatrical release), and publicity photos have indicated that Klingons may play some part in the new movie. But do Bat'leth's make an appearance?
BMX biking became a phenomenon in the 1970s as kids started imitating off-road motocross races with their own bicycles. By the middle of the decade, BMX racing was an organized sport, and bicycle companies were designing bikes specifically for BMX competitions. But the success of one of those brands can be traced back to one specific moment: the day Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extraterrestrial premiered in theaters. That brand was Kuwahara.
Kuwahara, along with a group of local bikers from Torrance, California, gave E.T. its most iconic scene. After E.T.'s release in 1982, everyone wanted a Kuwahara bike. A man named Howie Cohen, who owned a bicycle shop in Torrance, supplied the Kuwahara bikes for the production after being told he'd be able to sell the exclusive licensed bikes of the movie. The choice paid off--E.T. became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, and Cohen helped distribute Elliot's Kuwahara bike to a thousand distributors across the US.
The Kuwahara bikes were only half of the recipe for success, though--E.T.'s inspiring three-and-a-half minute chase scene wouldn't have worked without the eight stunt bikers who filled in for Elliot, his older brother Michael, and their friends. But as Narratively's story "The BMX Boys of E.T." reveals, the kids were never credited for their stunt work. Of the eight, only one has a credit on IMDB; none of them have their names in E.T.'s credits.
The story of how they made it into the movie is a lost bit of trivia about one of Hollywood's great movies. It starts with Spielberg telling his nephew and his nephew's friends what BMX brand he planned to use in the movie. They shot it down and said he should use Kuwahara, instead--the brand had a heavy presence in BMX magazines and was popular among BMX bikers at the time, but wasn't well-known outside those circles.
The next key moment came when Robert Cardoza, a BMX rider who worked at Cohen's shop, delivered the Kuwahara bicycles to the set. Spielberg told him what kind of stunts he had in mind for the film's chase scene, and Cardoza told him there was no way the actors could pull off the tricks. He showed Spielberg some of his own BMX tricks. That landed him the first stunt rider position in the film. And then he directed producer Kathleen Kennedy to a local BMX track, where she would find several more skilled riders to serve as doubles.
Narratively tells the rest of the story of the riders filming E.T.'s chase scene, how they saw the film early, and how they discovered they weren't credited in the film. Audio clips from interviews with Cardoza and Cohen also pepper the story. Each one is a must-listen if you're interested in the story behind the iconic chase scene.
Although the late William Castle, the man who gave us such films as Macabre, The House on Haunted Hill, and The Tingler, had a reputation for making schlocky, low budget horror movies, he was recently called the first interactive filmmaker. And indeed, his gimmicks did make audiences an active part of the movie going experience, even if an inflatable skeleton floating over the audience, or seat buzzers zapping you with mild electrical current wasn’t as innovative as creating IMAX, Dolby Atmos sound, or even D-Box.
Castle was somewhat of a low budget Hitchcock, and much like the master of suspense he would appear in the coming attractions of his films, explaining what kind of low budget fun the audience had in store if they went to his movies. Like Hitchcock, Castle become a brand of his own, and a recognizable face to young horror fans growing up. (Castle would even appear at the local movie theaters, talking to fans, chomping a big cigar, asking them what they thought of the picture.)
It all started with his 1958 horror film Macabre. Castle knew he couldn’t make a movie as scary as Hitchcock, but he hatched a fun plan to bring audiences to the theaters. As Castle recalled in his autobiography, he heard that Lloyds of London would insure anything, and he got them to put up a million dollar policy for anyone who died of fright watching the movie.
“Nobody’s going to drop dead,” Castle assured them. “It’s just a publicity stunt.” The movie began with a ticking clock, and an announcer warning the audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, when the clock reaches sixty seconds, you will be insured by Lloyds of London for one thousand dollars against death by fright during Macabre. Lloyds of London sincerely hopes none of you will collect.”
Audiences ate it up, and Macabre was a big hit. With the House on Haunted Hill, which starred Vincent Price, Castle came up with “Emergo,” where an inflatable skeleton floated above the audience on a wire. Once time the skeleton fell into the audience, who tossed it around like a beach ball, and at another screening, the kids in the audience threw trash at the inflatable for target practice.
Then came The Tingler, which also starred Price.
Adam joined John Landis yesterday to discuss the legacy of Ray Harryhausen, who died yesterday at age 92. Harryhausen was a film effects pioneer, known for his work with stop-motion animation. You can see his work in films such as Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (1971).
To hear the full interview, click Read More below.
Remember those IBM researchers who made the world's smallest movie using stop-motion manipulation of individual atoms? They also used their atom-arranging Scanning Tunneling Microscope to create some Star Trek fan art. The original Trek logo, Enterprise ship, and Vulcan salute were all recreated using the two-ton piece of equipment. And as with each frame in the "A Boy and His Atom" short film, these micro pictures each took over a week to produce. Unrelated Star Trek awesomeness: 3D Systems is offering to 3D print your likeness on a miniature Star Trek figurine using its Projet printers, though the cost for each print is $70.
When people write about the great directors of our modern era, they often inexplicably leave out people who direct horror films. Yet it often takes an incredibly skilled filmmaker to make a great scary movie. All of the elements, such as the cinematography, pacing music, and editing have to come together and work like a well-oiled machine in the best scary movies.
It may have seemed odd that a comedy writer, Carl Gottlieb, was picked to craft the screenplay for Jaws, but as Gottlieb explains, “Comedy, at its most rudimentary level is really a craft, there’s really a technique to it. A shock moment in a horror film is like the punch line of a joke. If it’s not set up properly, it doesn’t work well. If it’s handled clumsily or bobbled, it doesn’t work at all.”
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s love letter to horror, he wrote that a filmmaker takes a “great risk” when making a horror movie because if it’s not made with any skill, “it often fails into painful absurdity or squalid porno-violence.”
Indeed, a great horror film doesn’t happen by accident, so here are a few common denominators I’ve noticed in the best of them, some good building blocks to help create a good, scary tale if you will.
Most of us know the Alfred Hitchcock rule of suspense. A bomb is under the table, the audience knows it’s going to go off in ten minutes but the people sitting there have no clue. Instead of having the bomb go off immediately and shocking the audience for a moment, now the audience is on the edge of their seat for what feels like an interminable length of time. As the master director himself once said, there’s no terror in a bang, only the anticipation of one.
I’ve always loved the first twenty minutes of When a Stranger Calls, which takes its time building fear, and it also built scares with simple ideas. Fred Walton, the writer/director of Stranger, advises, “Don’t be afraid to slow down and get into the details of what’s happening each moment. The clock is ticking, the wind is blowing outside, the ice cream bar is melting, all these little things flesh out the environment that the protagonist is struggling in. The things that scare me are the most realistic things, and for most people, the realistic things tend to be really small like the phone ringing, a knock at the door.”
IBM research has produced a 242 frame stop-motion film featuring animated atoms. That's right, the team arranged atoms and carbon monoxide molecules into position using a needle with an electric current, and shot images using a two-ton tunneling microscope that magnifies atoms by 100 million times. Frames took 10 days of 18 hour shifts to capture, each. The exercise was conducted to spread awareness of science, and the lessons learned from it will be used to explore the use of small groups of atoms for computation and data storage. Full video here.
Today our smartphones, DSLRs and other cameras use digital image stabilization to cut down on the jitter and blurriness caused by motions big and small. We can walk, while carrying a camera, and produce video that's relatively steady, something that wasn't possible with early digital cameras. In the film world, that's been possible for decades thanks to the Steadicam, which was invented by cinematographer Garrett Brown in 1976. The Steadicam changed what was possible in filmmaking, and Brown will soon be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame thanks to his creation.
The Steadicam isn't Brown's only important invention--his website reveals he's also behind the Skycam used at football games, Divecam, and other frequently used camera systems. Steadicam first showed up in the iconic training montage in Rocky when Sylvester Stallone runs up the steps outside the Philadelphia Art Museum. Brown started working on the Steadicam after being annoyed that walking with a camera was so much shakier than our own vision, which has a sort of built-in image stabilization.
NPR recently conducted a great interview with Brown to talk about the invention of the Steadicam and some of his other history in the movie business. Here's a great quote about the splash Steadicam made when it arrived on the scene in the 1970s:
"I could show up with a demo reel of 30 impossible shots, obviously impossible to anybody that knew anything, and not give them a clue of how it was done," Brown says. "So showing up with a reel just knocked down the doors. It just floored everybody."
Listen to the 17-minute interview on NPR.
This week, Norm shares his love for collecting art prints from independent artists and talks about the screen printed poster scene. One showcased poster was even designed by a Tested reader.
Our friends at Cinefix posted this recreation of the rooftop fight scene from the first Matrix movie--the one that introduced the world to bullet time. But instead of using a complicated rig with dozens of cameras, the crew here simulated the effect with...slinkys.
It’s really too bad that today’s generation doesn’t understand what’s so fun about the low budget movies of yesteryear. We lost the drive-ins a long time ago, and gems like Plan 9 From Outer Space don’t even play on late night TV anymore. When the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez co-directed Grindhouse came out in 2007, audiences didn’t even understand the concept of a double-bill, and many left theaters without realizing there was a whole other feature after Planet Terror.
This is really a shame because when you worked for a producer like Roger Corman, you got real hands-on experience working on a feature, even if it wasn’t high art. (That many alumni who worked with Corman went on to the Hollywood A-list speaks for itself.) Yes, a lot of times the results were laughable, but with a lot of these films it’s remarkable to see what people could do with a few bucks and some ingenuity back in the day.
Rob Zombie, who is a huge B-movie fan, loved how directors of the drive-in era were able to work on miniscule budgets. He told Direct TV magazine, “Sometimes real genius came out of it. There is more passion and heart and iconic imagery in Plan 9 From Outer Space than there is in most of the crap that comes out now. Sure it’s a clunky movie, and of course it’s primitive, but it probably cost about five hundred bucks to make. Give anybody five hundred bucks today and they can’t even order a sandwich with it, let alone make a movie.”
These days so many fans love to make a game out of pointing out a movie’s “gaffes” or mistakes, and a lot of this began with Ed Wood’s movies, which had visible mistakes galore.
But Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the screenwriters of the Ed Wood biopic, developed an appreciation for the hard work directors like Ed put into their work from working on low budget movies themselves.
Alexander recalled worked long, long hours for $105 a week, “But we were doin’ it because we were having fun,” he says. “At that point, I could sort of look back at Ed Wood’s films and say that maybe the people who made fun of him were wrong. Maybe they’re just kickin’ this guy around and saying, ‘Oh isn’t he incompetent, isn’t that funny?’ Ed directed half a dozen features. That’s pretty good for someone who came out to Hollywood to break into the movies. Most people who come out here to be directors don’t direct anything.”
And once Ed’s life story hit the big screen, there was the hilarious irony that Tim Burton made a $20 million dollar movie that copied bargain basement effects in immaculate detail.
Hey guys, remember Rubbah? It's one of the classic industrial films we used to play in a continuous loop for battery rundown tests in the early days of Tested. That film, along with 2,000 other corporate and "ephemeral" films of that era, are part of the Prelinger video archives (now in the Library of Congress). An independent app developer has just released an iOS app to tap into that library, letting you search and sort all of the Prelinger films and view them on your phone. The app, simply called Linger, was not developed by Rick Prelinger, but has his blessing. It's $3 and available now.
1If you haven't seen Cabin in the Woods, go watch it before reading this post, because 1) It's a total blast and 2) This post will spoil the film's mysterious premise.
Now, onto Cabin in the Woods: Even though the movie reveals its meta premise right away, with Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins preparing for a night of scientifically controlled sacrifice, it takes awhile for the film to fully reveal how controlled every element of its world is. Some of the most fun moments in the movie come when Whitford and Jenkins toy with their prey with their computers, and the set design provides the perfect balance between a drab (but also high tech) government-looking control room and the horror-flavored cabin that serves as the primary setting. This is where smart interface design comes in, and sci-fi blog Make It So recently published an interview with the two designers who gave Cabin in the Woods its look.
Impressively, Coplin Le Bleu and Chris Kieffer designed everything for Cabin in the Woods remotely under tight time constraints. Their interview with Make It So offers an interesting perspective into how movie interfaces are designed. Cabin in the Woods is also a bit of a special case, since it's a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi and horror that is still, at least in terms of its electronics, very grounded in real-world tech.
"I started designing the interface with the idea that it was an older system set up, that might have looked high tech in it’s prime but had 'weathered' a little bit," said Le Bleu. " So I tried to add a lot of terminal and DOS style elements that would imply a lower, underlining level of programing. I also felt it needed to have a utilitarian and mechanical feel to the design as it would be controlling and monitoring the different parts of the house."
The Make It So Blog's analysis of sci-fi films often points out design elements that add visual flair to a scene but don't make practical sense. And that's part of moviemaking--these elements are often only on screen for a few seconds at a time and aren't supposed to be given much thought. But that doesn't necessarily make them easy to design:
"It was very challenging for me to display a lot of 'nondescript' information to make the screens look busy without tying that graphic to what ever pertinent plot point might be going on at the time," Le Bleu said.
Kieffer added to that by explaining that realistic functionality just doesn't work in movies, a lot of the time:
The James Bond films, much as we love them, don't always tell the most believable villainous plots. It's still painful for us to think about Die Another Day's North Korean-turned-British-playboy who wants to carve up the Earth's surface with a sunlight-laser satellite. But an interesting post from Wired Science blogger Deborah Blum calls into question a different rogue plot element in the latest Bond film, Skyfall, that actually applies to decades of spy flicks: Cyanide.
Cyanide serves as a convenient plot device to kill off a lackey before he can spill the villain's secrets--most spy movies would only be 30 minutes long if the hero could interrogate the first bad guy he comes across. But as the trope goes, spies often keep a cyanide pill hidden in a false tooth, and when captured, they can bite down on it, releasing the toxin into their mouth and killing themselves in seconds. Blum writes for Wired that cyanide absolutely works--it may take a 2-5 minutes to kill, so it's a bit exaggerated in the movies--but the plot device is sound.
Mostly. Exception: Skyfall. Blum distinguishes between the gaseous hydrogen cyanide, used in Nazi concentration camps, and the salt forms of potassium and sodium cyanide, both of which are lethal when swallowed. Spies did carry suicide pills. But in Skyfall, villain Javier Bardem reveals that he bit down on a hydrogen cyanide capsule. It didn't kill him, but it did corrode his face and melt away most of his jaw.
Plot holes in James Bond movies? Nothing surprising. Cyanide pills, though? Surprisingly real.
Blum says: That doesn't make sense! "In the movie scenario, it’s identified as hydrogen cyanide," she writes. Remember, that's the cyanide usually delivered as a gas, not in a solid form. "And according to the script, it’s not lethal but corrosive...Although hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is best known as a lethal gas (it actually has a chemical warfare classification), it can also be found in liquid form, where it is usually referred to as Prussic Acid or hydrocyanic acid. This is what I suspect the Skyfall scriptwriter grabbed onto when he chose it for his destructive suicide pill."
The problem with that acid bit, Blum writes, is that hydrocyanic acid sits below citric acid on the scale of acidity. Since lemons typically don't melt our jaws, hydrocyanic acid probably wouldn't, either.
But now we've learned something. Plot holes in James Bond movies? Nothing surprising. Cyanide pills, though? Surprisingly real. Check out the rest of Blum's post for a more technical breakdown of how cyanide pills work, and for some more real world examples of spies using cyanide, like these glasses with a hidden pill compartment.
The remake of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead came out earlier this month to a big opening weekend at the box office and surprisingly good reviews. The box office pundits were also surprised that this new Evil Dead outgrossed the 3D conversion of Jurassic Park, and considering the Fede Alvarez-directed horror movie cost a reported $17 million, it should definitely make a nice profit.
Watching behind the scenes footage from the new Evil Dead, which was shot in New Zealand instead of the backwoods of Tennessee, I saw a segment being shot with a jib crane that can smoothly elevate the camera high and low. Even with a relatively small budget (by Hollywood standards) Alvarez is making use of camera technology that Sam Raimi never had access to over twenty years ago, and you could only imagine what Raimi could have done with such a great, and expensive, piece of equipment. Then again, if Raimi had too much money at his disposal, the original Evil Dead wouldn’t have been anywhere near as innovative or fun.
This is especially true with the camera work, where Raimi created the “shaky cam” a low budget rebuke to the Steadicam, which he couldn’t afford to use on Dead. To create the effect, the camera was bolted to a 2x4 piece of wood, and while shooting at eighteen frames a second, two people held on to each end of the plank and ran through the woods with it. When it came time to run through the house with the shaky cam, one cameraman would creep to the center, then the second guy would let go and let the main operator with the camera run with it.
As Dead producer Rob Tapert recalls, “We did a lot of tests with it, and we were actually very pleased with how it turned out. We never considered the shakiness a problem, we thought it showed the energy of the force behind it.” And indeed, it gives the evil force flying through the woods the feel of an airplane taking off, or the velocity of a rollercoaster, an effect that would have been smoothed out with a Steadicam.
Sam Raimi introduced a few other tricks to born from his budget contraints that gave Evil Dead its unique look.
