Behind the great visual effects in 'Flight'

Flight, which opened last week and started out by reeling in a hefty $25 million and great word-of-mouth, has yet another two things going for it. Not only is it a character-driven drama, it has great special effects. The harrowing plane crash scene is visceral and frightening and suspenseful. There is no way this movie will ever end up being shown as in-flight entertainment. While I was watching , I didn't pay too much attention to what was vCGI and what wasn't: It just looked so real, I wasn't even distracted by any hokey gaps in the visual effects.

This behind-the-scenes video has some great insight into how they simulated flying and a plane crash in Flight. It involved slicing up parts of a real plane and mechanically turning them upside down for the purpose of the shoot. I hope the extras playing passengers were well-compensated for having to sit in what's essentially an amusement park ride for hours, with luggage flying at them.

 

 

Another technique that the video highlights is the use of matte painting to make the weather outside look stormy. Changing the weather in the back of a shot is so commonplace, even low-budget pictures like Take Shelter can do that, though admittedly illustrating an impending storm was a necessity for that movie and was likely a priority even with limited funds. And remember the realistic "other Earth" in Another Earth? That, too, came from painting the sky differently.  When I think of visual effects, I think of things like rear projection, or its updated green screens, which help provide the views outside the plane windows in Flight. But we rarely think of weather. In the craft of filmmaking, sometimes techniques with mattes can provide shortcuts, but they also expand the power of the crew. These techniques are something of a perfectionist's dream, allowing directors to subtly re-time events and lighting, snow, and rainfall. So kudos to Flight for combining visual effects with mechanical ingenuity.

 

Behind the scenes with Selick on 'Coraline'

By Sarah Sluis

Coraline releases this Friday, and, its creepiness level is right up there with director Henry Selick's 1993 movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film I found a little too disturbing and unsettling when I saw it on the upper side of grade school (to be fair, I was much more fright-averse than average). For an adult, however, Selick's tone conjures up just the right amount of heebie-jeebies. In the age of computer animation, it's astonishing to see the meticulous, detail-oriented work that goes into such a production--of note, it's the first stop-motion film to be filmed in 3D. Our Maria Garcia interviewed director Selick here about the filmmaking process, and our Executive Editor Kevin Lally reviewed the final product here, and both stories are worth checking out.

In Garcia's interview, Selick touches upon that stop-motion, Chucky-like quality of puppets:

"the puppets 'make the creepy

things in the story more charming' and 'add creepiness to the

charming stuff'"

In Coraline, puppets not only depict the action, but have a sort of role in the film itself. Coraline's Other Mother and Other Father have buttons for eyes, giving them unchanging, penetrating expressions. Over at Wired, they have a slide show of the production process. Pink cherry blossoms, for example, are hand-painted pieces of popcorn--that took eight hundred hours to paint. Grass is painted fake hair, facial expressions (which number 25,000) come from 350 types of eyebrows and 700 types of mouths, and steam is cotton that defies gravity through hair spray.

After the jump, more photos from the Coraline production.

The popcorn-decorated trees

Piano wire mustache

Creating Coraline

Cotton held up with hairspray