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10.17.00
Could you try to articulate the difference between special effects and visual effects?
This report comes from the Official Site!
Answered by: Jeff Olson of ILM
Special effects cover the practical, real time enhancements to a scene as it is filmed. Examples include weather effects (wind, rain, snow, fog etc.), dynamic action (fire, explosions, shaking the set or vehicle) and special techniques like rear projection, hanging miniatures, and forced perspective sets.
Rear projection involves projecting either a still or moving picture onto the rear of a translucent screen in front of which live-action is photographed so that both the background on the screen and foreground action are combined into a single image on the exposed film. Examples: almost any time you see a car interior with the street scene passing by out the rear window (as in Hitchcock's Notorious) or western landscape rolling by in the old cowboy movies.
Hanging miniatures are used to extend settings beyond what could be easily built, and involve careful positioning of detailed models that 'hang' down into a portion of the frame during a locked off (static camera) shot. Example: Ben Hur, Cleopatra, El Cid.
Forced perspective sets allow the illusion of greater distance than the available space might permit, by tapering all constructed angles to diminish more rapidly than reality. This works as long as the camera doesn't shift position to the right or left. Examples: Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Die Hard 2 (the airport set), and Howard the Duck.
Visual effects, on the other hand, are added after the scene has been shot, and range from simple double exposure tricks (where the film is partially exposed with a 'latent image' and later, further exposed with added elements) to motion control miniatures (shot with long exposures for depth of field focus against a blue screen) and other blue, green, or black screen elements (people, explosions, smoke, flying debris) which are later composited with the original plate photography. The removal (and alteration) of unwanted rigging, reflections, and other two dimensional 'fixes' such as joining together two different actions in the same shot is another common visual trick (as the two different McFlys played by Michael J. Fox in the Back to the Future films). More recently, the creation and addition of entirely synthetic animated characters, settings and environments has become the most publicized part of the visual effects industry, and appear in some form in almost every major film we see today, even if limited to a few digital matte paintings to set the scene.
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