“Oscar Micheaux, (born 1854, died 1951) was an important African American filmmaker. Micheaux had a different, sort of parallel film career compared to other filmmakers of the era. While the early days of commercial American cinema were dominated by a handful of studios—white heterosexual men telling a certain kind of story—Micheaux worked independently, making distinct kinds of film specifically for Black audiences, known at the time as Race Films.”
Liberated from the sound stages, indie filmmaking begins
When film equipment became smaller, more portable, it paved the way for other types of film to burst upon the scene. Italian neo realism, auteur theory. It was then that films representing these cinema styles began showing up in American arthouse theaters. Shown mostly in urban areas like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and-Los Angeles, filmgoers started to watch these films and get new ideas.
Around the same time, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a cultural inflection that coincided with the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. There was a whole counter-cultural group of people who wanted to express a new kind of story.
This led to the emergence of new filmmaking styles, voices, and visions. John Cassavetes was one important filmmaker who made the type of films that led to the American independent film movement.
Independent film always had more diversity than the studios, but not as much as they could. Though the film industry was still dominated by white, middle class cis-gender males this slowly started to change.
The aperture started to widen.
In the 1970s, we finally started to see more interesting films being made by women and people of color. And this movement only grew over the years.
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“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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