Visual Effects (VFX): Special Effects

“Special effects are a wonderful tool in the film industry. Some more obvious special effects use would be, as an example, in the Avengers films. However, many other films use visual effects that aren’t as easy to detect,” explains David Irving.
“These effects simply enhance the image—whether it’s adding elements to a crowd, a composite shot. This is all done in post-production.”
Some special VFX examples
You have to be careful about working VFX material in the film post-production process. If you’ve got a CGI-heavy movie, you’ll have a post-production budget to do all that work. However, post-production CGI can be very expensive, so you want to be very prudent with costs.
For example, in the movie Forrest Gump, the Gary Sinise character loses his legs in the opening reels of the film and spends the rest of the movie legless.
Obviously, we did not go to Sinise and say ‘we’d like to remove your legs surgically. We can put them back on later because science is so wonderful.’ Sinise would have said ‘no thank you.’
“Instead, we created visual images with the help of a green screen,” says Irving. “We put the actor (Sinise) in green socks against a green background and (using editing and VFX software) we erased his legs.”
But we only do that for three or four key shots, so that the audience, in their brain, sees him without legs. For the rest of the film, we have him in a wheelchair. We only show him from the waist up, but the audience believes that he has no legs.
VFX costs may be too much for most film budgets
Working post-production CGI or special effects is challenging. When Jurassic Park was made, Dennis Mirren—who later won the special effects Academy Award for that film—was told by director Steven Spielberg to make the dinosaurs ‘cross in front of the actors on camera.’
This had never been done before. Up to that point, it was either rear screen, where the actor would look toward the back, and go “awgggh,” or it’d be front screen, same thing. But before Jurassic Park, we’d never seen animated/CGI characters cross in front of a live actor. But Spielberg said, that’s what I want.
Dennis Mirren took a year to do the R&D necessary to create the special effects and software that allowed them just that. When he accepted the statue—this is the statue I hope you all get one day—he said, ‘from now on, no director ever has to compromise his or her vision.’
But that sentence should have ended with, ‘…if you’ve got enough money.’
“So just be very careful about CGI in post-production. It’s an expensive part of the filmmaking process. It looks wonderful, just make sure that you’re covered. And just don’t count on it too much,” Irving ends.
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