“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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“When I talk about pre-production and production in sci-fi or visual effects, I really should say sci-fi or visual effects world,” says Seith Mann. “Because now in film production, there’s much more visual effects usage. For instance, we used visual effects on The Breaks to recreate physical realities that no longer existed. To depict architecture of 1990s New York City, we removed modern day objects from our 2015 New York City shoot—any evidence we were not actually in 1990.”
“There’s a lot we can agree on, when talking about what that reality should look like (1990s New York), while trying to get as close as we can to it,” continues Mann. “But it’s very different in a sci-fi environment, you’re trying to create and present something as reality that doesn’t even exist in our world.”
For instance, something like the “Crooked Man” in Raising Dion, which was, on paper, this lightning monster, which is cool when you read it. But then it’s like, but what exactly does a lightning monster look like? This feels like it.
We went through many different drawings and concept diagrams of what this monster would look like. Once you have something, that’s great because you can share it with your actors, other crew people. Then they have a sense of what it is they’re imagining.
“That’s important because when we’re shooting, the monster’s not actually there,” explains Mann. “But I need people to be reacting to the same thing, even though there’s nothing there.”
I mean, there may be some lights up on stands that shoot lightning strikes for timing, something like interactive lighting that will work when everything’s cut together. “But my poor cast is tasked with imagining something that they’ve never seen before. They must react to it in a way that’s believable and consistent among these different characters,” says Mann.
I can’t assume that, because something’s not there, I don’t have to be specific. That’s a false assumption, even though there’s some flexibility.
I have to say to yourself, “OK, the monster’s over there and he’s hurting something now”, as far as camera composition and timing is concerned. “Not just for the cast, but for any interactive gags that are going to help sell the illusion once the visual component is laid in,” Mann ends.
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“After the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of silent film and transforming into talkies, there was life going on,” Alrick Brown notes. He teaches his students, “you can’t make films outside of the world. You make films in the world.”
Two world wars happened in that time period. There was filmmaking that happened before World War I and after World War I. And then you have filmmaking that happened after World War II when the world changed a bit. A lot of lives were lost. This has a reflection on society and a reflection on storytelling in Alrick’s opinion.
As societies go through traumatic times, the art also changes and shifts. The Italians, Germans, and other people started looking at their stories and said, “let’s be a little bit more honest, a little bit more truthful, and not do this romantic storytelling that Hollywood is always doing.” Hollywood picked up on that. There were people in Hollywood who said, “yeah, let’s stop romanticizing. Let’s get a little bit darker and a little bit grittier.”
Alrick thinks that Snow White was one of the first color-popping films. Filmmakers had always tried to play around with color and different hues, even in the black and white era, to give a different feel of a film. But 1937 or 1938, when color started becoming this thing, another layer was added, he says.
Alrick thinks that no one can argue that you’re able to capture color now. You’re able to look at real life and think, “what is that real life that you’re going to capture?” But back then, filmmakers had this existential crisis that the world was getting a little darker, but the films were becoming more colorful.
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When Yahlin Chang wrote about child separation in The Handmaid’s Tale…

she had no idea how much that subject would hit close to home. “Parents and children were being ripped away from each other at the Mexican border,” Yahlin recalls. “Refugees were being put in cages.”

Yahlin remembers writing similar scenes for the show. “There is a scene with rebellious women being put in these large cages, these holding pens,” she explains. “And they did look like the holding pens that we’re using to jail migrants and refugees.”

The show took the startling imagery even further in an episode called, “The Last Ceremony.” “I wrote the scene where June gets to see her daughter for 10 minutes,” explained Yahlin. “Her daughter has been kidnapped and is now living with new parents. This scene is both a hello and a goodbye.”

When Yahlin wrote this part, she couldn’t imagine that the same scene played out every day in the United States. “I talked to UN experts, psychologists, and international human rights activists,” says Yahlin. “We were talking about things that happen in Laos, Cambodia, the Congo, and Syria. We were talking about these incidents happening all over the world. But I never for one second thought that these scenes would be happening in America.”

The week that the episode aired, news broke that the United States was separating parents and children at the southern border.

“You’d see these scenes on TV of parents and children being ripped away from each other. This was happening in our own country,” Yahlin remembers.

When the uncanny episode aired, Yahlin got a lot of attention from reporters. “Suddenly, my phone was lighting up,” she recalls. “All these reporters wanted to ask me, ‘How did you know this was going to happen?’ And my answer was that we had no idea. We just spent a lot of time asking what would happen if you have the worst people in charge with the worst possible motives. What are the consequences of their horrible and cruel decisions? And so sometimes, our show interacts with the real world in extremely unfortunate ways.”

Learn from Yalin Chang in the online certificate course, Film and TV Industry Essentials. Grads get a certificate of completion from New York University’s acclaimed Tisch School of the Arts and learn from experts across the industry – including the pros at NYU, IndieWire, Rolling Stone.