Does anyone know anything about the special effects in movies?

Question

hey

my group and i r doing a science techno presentation and we've decided to do the special effects from movies. does anyone know of anything to do with that topic or any handy websites?

thanx.

Answer 1

don't ask me....

Answer 2

There are different categories of  effects which are used in movies.  Makeup, Audio, Set design & props as well as visual effects.    I assume that you are referring to visual effects.

There is Art AND Science in special effects. Science provides an understanding of how our brains process audio and visual information into what we perceive. While the Art is knowing when to use an effect to fool our senses.  I have been of teh opinion that the best special effect used is one you don't perceive.

A trait of our eyesight is called "Persistence of Vision", a fancy way of saying that our retinas can't process rapidly changing immages.   Have a your picture taken with a flash and you see a spot where the fash was for several moments. The overstimulation of the retina cells take sometime to return to normal and until so our brains continue to receive the stimulation from the retina. This is why you see spots for several seconds after a flash photo.  

Using the same principle a movie shows us a series of images (15 to 30 per second) each image may have a slight difference in an object position.  It is Persistance of vision which allows us to perceive an object moving smoothly across the film (or TV).

Having two eyes provides us with stereoscopic vision (Binocular vision) which allows use to perceive depth and 3 dimensional objects.  As we view objects that are far away there perspective changes and they appear smaller the further away the object is. Think of a set of raill road tracks  going off into the distance which appear to merge into a single point in the distance (Called a vanishing point in the art world). Our ability to focus on an object allows us to perceive depth and determine if an object is closer or further away.

Movies are two dimensional (unless you goto a 3D movie) and projected on to a plane which we focus our eyes on.

As a result you cannot tell how far something is inrelation to an other object in the film as we do with real world objects. Instead we rely upon size to give us visual clues, associating smaller size of familiar objects  with being further away.  Film makers use this to their advantage with a technique called "Forced Percpective"  .  Through the use of exaggerated angles a fake vanishing point is created to give an illusion of depth and size.   This is not limited to set design as mattes benefit from forces perspective as well. Mattes are drawings that provide a background for some live action fore ground subject.    A very  early technique was to paint a picture onto a sheet of glass and position it in front of the camera. Unpainted sections allowed the subject to be filmed with the painted sections providing a static background.  Now a days this is done with blue/green screen and picture in picture effects.

Answer 3

you can search it on google or youtube

hope i helped and i wish you the best of luck in your science techno presentation