Special effects differentiate movies from theatrical acting. The different types of special effects used in film create more visually appealing content.
With special effects, movie producers can get natural life scenes without the dangers.
My heart skipped when Dominic Loretto drove the Lykan Hyper sport through a skyscraper.
Breaking through a series of glass, the car jumped to another building, and I was curious to discover how they did that.
At first, I thought it was computer-generated imagery. But the driving was so real that it couldn’t have been the work of CGI alone. My curiosity led me to scour the web, looking for answers.
Do you care to know what I found? To achieve the stunt in the Etihad Towers, the production team built glass walls as high as 40 feet in Atlanta.
A professional stunt driver then got behind the wheel of a real Lykan Hypersport and drove the glass walls.
The rest of the production consisted of Computer-generated imagery and special effects. Incredible, right? There is something more impressive than that, and it is dropping a comment and sharing this article with your friends.
Some crazy scenes are dangerous to film in real life—scenes like lightning blasting through the clouds or floods laying waste to towns. You will probably be in your basement if you are warned about a tornado.
Special effects have enabled filmmakers to achieve these weather conditions in a safe and controlled environment.
The different types of special effects used in movies are based on the visual experience the filmmakers want the viewers to have.
One of the main reasons I love any movie is the visuals; they must be compelling and accurate enough to capture my attention.
Brief History of Special Effects in Movies
Oscar Rejlander produced the world’s first special effects image in 1857. He combined different sections of 32 negatives into one shot, resulting in a montaged combination print.
Alfred Clark introduced special effects to the movie world by creating the first motion picture special effects in 1895.
He did this while filming the beheading scene in Mary, Queen of Scots. The process of achieving this was quite intriguing at the time.
Clark had an excellent idea to make the execution look real. He shot the scene using an actor dressed in Mary’s costume.
As the executioner raised the ax above the actor’s head, Clark stopped the camera and instructed all the actors to freeze on the spot.
To me, that was very dangerous. How would you feel if an ax was dangling over your head? Let us know in the comments section.
Clark removed the stand-in actor from the set, and a dummy, Mary, replaced the actor.
He began filming again as the executioner severed the head of the dummy. This particular special effect technique was the go-to effect for almost a century, and this was a brilliant and less demanding way of achieving special effects.
Clark’s use of this special effect began the evolution of the different types of special effects used in movies today.
With the advent of color photography, the new technology refined special effects to match.
Because of the introduction of color, traveling matte effects such as the bluescreen and sodium vapor process were developed.
Several movies executed special effects using paintings, animations, and miniatures.
Some movies that became standard in special effects include Forbidden Planet and The Ten Commandments.
Difference Between Special Effects and Visual Effects
Special effects refer to visual effects added to the set practically. Depending on the requirements, various elements, such as fire, water, and snow, may be added to scenes. I prefer special effects in explosions to computer-generated explosions.
Visual or video effects refer to visual effects added to scenes during post-production. The actors do not need to get wet to get a rainy special effect, and visual effects are digital recreations of special effects.
Using visual effects, a green screen can add backgrounds to scenes and generate models and even creatures.
Whether to use special or visual effects depends on many factors, including personal preference, scenery, cost, etc.
Special effects feel more authentic than visual effects. However, computer-generated imagery has come a long way and looks more real daily. Special effects were created for Master Yoda, a popular Star Wars character.
The producers created the large spaceships in the early Star Wars episodes using special effects and miniature models.
Special effects have also evolved throughout the years to provide more natural images.
Different Types of Special Effects Used in Movies
1. Animatronics
Producers can develop true-to-life creatures using this technique as one type of special effect used in movies.
Animatronics are simple puppets controlled with mechatronics. They are trendy in portraying characters in films and theme parks, where they serve as sources of attraction.
Animatronics, as we know them today, were once called robots. As robots became more associated with practical and programmable machines, Animatronics became a household name.
The dinosaur you saw in Jurassic World was animatronic. The field is not as simple as we might imagine, and it integrates puppetry, anatomy, and mechatronics to achieve the moving figures we see on screen.
One significant difference between Animatronics and puppetry is that the former can be controlled by a human or a computer, including teleoperation. Motion actuators create muscle movements and realistic motions.
Bodyshells and flexible skins encase the figures to obtain authentic life visuals. Artists use different materials to make them.
Hard and soft plastic materials make flexible skins that are attached to other components, such as colors, hair, and feathers, to make the figure feel natural.
Design of an Animatronics
Artists sketch the animatronic and make a small model for study and approval. This process takes a lot of time.
After the small model is approved, a team of artists creates a full-size figure sculpture. They can add facial features, skin texture, and other details.
The model is then used to make a mold, which is vital if multiple Animatronics are needed.
The artists build the animatronics character around an internal steel supporting frame. The muscles are then attached to these skeletal bones.
They can also make muscles using elastic netting composed of styrene beads. The inner structure supports the mechanical and electronic components.
Animatronics is a type of special effect used in movies that can reproduce natural life movements and even facial expressions. Foam rubber, silicone, or urethane are materials used to make the figure’s skin.
The artists pour the skin materials into molds and allow them to cure. Cutting a piece of fabric and embedding it in the foam rubber after pouring it into a mold enhances the strength.
Once the mixture is fully cured, the parts are separated and attached to the figure’s exterior.
The splitting into different pieces helps the figure have a hyper-realistic movement.
Animatronics design has come a long way with the use of 3D printers to make molds and models.
Structure and Materials of an Animatronic
There are two parts to an animatronic
Frame
Steel, aluminum, plastic, and wood are different materials used for the frame. Several considerations, such as strength and weight, are made before choosing a material, and cost is also a significant factor.
Exterior or skin
The skin is one part of an animatronic that can create different movie special effects. Artists also use other materials to make the skin, depending on the particular character requirement.
Material selection is vital for creating natural forms; you don’t want to see a dinosaur look like a rabbit.
Acrylic is the best material for making eyes and teeth; other materials include latex, silicone, polyurethane, and plaster.
Emotion Modeling with Animatronics
One of the most challenging parts of Animatronics is mimicking the emotional response of humans and other living creatures.
Making a figure smile, laugh, roar, or bark in excitement is challenging. However, vital progress has been made in the direction of emotional modeling.
The facial action coding system (FACS) is one of the most used emotional models. Ekman and Friesen developed this model, which defines six basic emotions that humans can recognize through facial expressions.
The emotions include anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. The Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) model postulated 22 emotional categories.
Animatronics remains one of the best types of special effects used in movies. Several movies that used this special effect include Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993), Aliens (1986), Terminator (1984), King Kong (1976), and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
2. Miniature Effect
Another type of special effect used in movies is the miniature effect. Creative filmmakers create beautiful scenes using miniatures and make complicated objects like space crafts using miniature models. They used these special effects extensively in the past.
The miniature effect is peculiar to the other types of special effects used in movies. It involves explicitly using scale models in motion pictures and television programs.
Once executed correctly, the miniature effect can create optical illusions that are pleasing to the eye.
Movie producers create convincing gravitational and other effects by combining scale models with high-speed photography and matte shots.
I’ll discuss matte shots later. Although computer-generated imagery has largely replaced miniature models, it still produces stunning effects.
Miniatures are often placed very close to the camera’s lens to keep miniatures in the foreground of a shot, especially when matte-painted backgrounds are involved.
The videographers adjust the exposure of the object being filmed in production to ensure that the actors appear well-illuminated by it.
The miniatures need more light to achieve exposure balance and eliminate any differences in the visual depth of the field between them and the actors. Forced perspective is the use of miniature in the foreground.
The use of scale models to obtain visual effects in the movie industry goes back to the early days of cinema.
Miniatures or models have reproduced images or 3D models of people, animals, buildings, scenes, and objects.
Movie producers use miniatures to recreate things that do not exist or to represent things that are too expensive, difficult, and dangerous to film, such as explosions and floods. Another form of using miniature effects is stop-motion animation.
Types of Miniature Effects
1. Forced Perspective
The forced perspective special effect technique uses optical illusion to make an object appear closer, farther away, more prominent, or smaller than in real life.
It manipulates human visual perception by using scaled objects and how they correlate with the vantage point or the camera.
A famous example of a scene where forced perspective is used is when dinosaurs howl and threaten the actors.
The filmmakers place the miniature dinosaur closer to the camera to create the illusion of a monstrously tall dinosaur.
Environmental conditions often obscure the difference in perspective, and the illusion results in a more believable effect.
The final scenes of the famous movie Casablanca contain this special effect. One scene shows an airport caught in the middle of a storm. The producers shot this entire scene in the studio’s comfort.
How was the Casablanca scene shot? Read further. The producers used a painted backdrop of an aircraft serviced by dwarfs placed next to the backdrop.
A downpour drew the viewer’s attention away from the backdrop, making it less noticeable.
Filmmakers used forced perspective as one type of special effect in movies during the early days of miniature effects.
How Forced Perspective is used as one of the types of Special Effects used in Movies
During the early days of using forced perspective, objects were distinct from their surroundings with a bit of blurring or different light shades added. This was because of the geometrical nature of light travel.
Light decreases in intensity from a point source as the inverse square of the distance traveled.
Therefore, to light up an object with the same level of intensity two times far away, the light source must be four times brighter.
Now, you can see that it required more light to obtain the illusion of a distant object being close to the object with the correct scale.
Besides lighting, camera operators make other tweaks to the camera to ensure proper depth of field.
Forced perspective is one of the technically demanding types of special effects used in movies.
One must be an expert in light and camera, and it is crucial to maintain the sharpness of the foreground and the background.
Filmmakers create miniature models to withstand the heat generated by the incandescent light sources typically used.
Different Movies That Used Forced Perspective
The Lord of the Rings movies used forced perspective. The producers separated characters who appeared to be standing next to each other several feet in depth from the camera.
Peter Jackson used this special effect to make dwarfs and Hobbits appear smaller than others.
A slight movement in the camera’s point of view would reveal the proper positions of these characters.
Film producers carefully execute the miniature effect, one type of special effect used in movies.
The Lord of the Rings 2, The Fellowship of the Ring, used enhanced forced perspective in moving shots.
Movable platforms carried mounted set portions that moved precisely according to the camera’s movement.
The enhanced form maintains the optical illusion. Harry Potter series used a similar technique to make Hagrid appear giant. Props placed around Harry and his fellow wizards were of average size.
Now, let’s go ahead and explore the other type of miniature effect. The producers of Harry Potter placed smaller, identical props around Hagrid, making Hagrid appear as a giant.
Forced perspective is an impressive technique for creating special effects in movies.
2. Stop Motion Animation
Stop-motion animation takes a long time to execute. Producers who use it in their movies go to great lengths to make the effects look real. It is not a simple form of special effect, and it requires a lot of patience.
In stop-motion animation, objects are manipulated in small increments. The videographers photograph the incrementally manipulated results frame by frame, resulting in independent motion when the frames are joined together.
The most commonly manipulated objects on set are puppets with movable joints and plasticine figures made of clay.
Pixilation refers to using stop-motion with live actors and cutout animation involving flat materials such as paper.
Let’s discuss the types of stop-motion effects and the movies used.
3. Stereoscopic Stop Motion
This special effect used in movies is rare. The first 3D stop motion animation was Motor Rhythm, also known as In Tune with Tomorrow, and John Norling produced Motor Rhythm in 1939.
The next stereoscopic stop-motion movie was The Incredible Invasion of the 20000 Giant Robots from Outer Space, which Elmer Kaan and Alexander Lentjes produced in 2000.
It was also the first film to combine 3D stereoscopic stop-motion with computer-generated imagery.
Other stop-motion movies are Caroline (2009) and ParaNorman (2011). The Nintendo 3DS video software has an option for stop-motion videos.
4. Go Motion
Go motion is stop motion on steroids. It is more complicated than stop motion. Phil Tippett co-developed the go motion, which was first used in the 1980 movie The Empire Strikes Back. A year later, Dragonslayer was produced. Earlier RoboCop movies also used this particular effect.
Go motion combined computer programming with hand movement to slightly move parts of the miniature model during each frame exposure. This produced a more realistic and truer-to-life motion-blurring effect.
Tipped applied this technique extensively in a short film he produced in 1984, Prehistoric Beast.
The film was about a carnivorous dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus, pursuing an herbivorous one, Monoclonius.
A year later, Christopher Reeve hosted a full-length documentary on dinosaurs with footage derived from Prehistoric Beast.
Phil Tippett later used his previous stop-motion models to produce his first photo-realistic dinosaurs using computers in Jurassic Park, 1993.
One of the advantages of stop-motion over CGI is the accurate display of real-life textures.
3. In-Camera Effects
One of the camera-centric types of special effects used in movies is in-camera effects.
The techniques, in the camera or on the camera and its parts, create the in-camera effects.
The post-production professionals receive the original video with the visual effects.
Examples of in-camera effects are the Schufftan process, dolly zoom, lens flares, lighting effects, filtrations using a fog filter or grad filter, shutter effects, bipacks slit-scan, infrared photography, reverse motion, rear projection, and phonotrope.
It might be hard to notice in-camera effects, but they play a significant role in creating the needed scene picture.
A famous illustration of the in-camera effect is in Star Trek, where a simple shaking motion of the camera makes the impression that there is motion in the scene. Let’s look at the dolly and zoom in on more details.
Dolly Zoom
The Zolly shot, Jaws effect, vertigo shot, and Hitchcock shot are some alternate names for dolly zoom. This type of special effect aims to undermine normal visual perception.
A camera operator adjusts the angle of view with the zoom lens. The camera moves either towards or away from the subject, keeping the subject the same size even when the camera moves closer or farther away.
Just imagine pulling a camera away from the subject while zooming in to maintain its size. When this happens, the background changes its size relative to the subject, causing perspective distortion.
One of the creative special effects used in movies is dolly zoom. The viewer sees a background growing in size and detail to overwhelm the foreground or foreground that grows and dominates the entire setting.
This effect is highly unsettling and has a strong emotional impact. It occurs because the viewer sees a change in perspective without a difference in the subject’s size. Films like Jaws and the Lord of the Rings series use this effect.
4. Prosthetic Make-up Effect
Real people play the scary zombies you’ve seen in some movies. Why do they look so dangerous? Producers use prosthetic makeup to achieve this effect.
The producers use this as one of the human-centric types of special effects used in movies, and it is applied directly to the actors.
Prosthetic make-up, also called special make-up effects or FX prosthesis, involves prosthetic sculpting, molding, and casting methods to obtain advanced cosmetic effects.
The first film to use prosthetic make-up effect is A Trip to the Moon. Produced in 1902, the French adventure short film used a combination of make-up and a prosthetic mask to make the man appear as if he were on the moon.
Jack Pierce, a famous Hollywood makeup artist, created the iconic Frankenstein character makeup worn by Boris Karloff.
He also did make-up for The Wolfman and other movies, and John Chambers introduced modern prosthetic make-up in Planet of the Apes.
Other movies that used prosthetic make-up effects include Little Big Man, the Terminator series, and The Thing.
