A lot of times I’ll be watching a VFX sequence in a film or on TV and something will cause my toes to curl as if my nose was just held under bag of 6 week old sheep intestines. A bad visual effect has a certain bump that takes you out of the fantasy that it was created to fulfill. Sometimes a shot goes astray due to a lack of technical skill or a feeling that the people involved just didn’t have enough time or money. But most often my VFX gag reflex is triggered by a lack of story in a shot or sequence. By story I mean an internal logic to what is happening on screen. You may be saying to yourself “Logic? WTF this is a visual effects movie for God’s sakes. We don’t need no stinking logic!” But before you do, let me tell you what I mean by logic. When it comes to the fantastic, we VFX folk are trying to get the audience to buy off on a completely outlandish scenario that we all know could never really occur. Even in the case of so-called invisible effects, all you are really seeing is a combination of many techniques put together in just the right way so that they make a reasonable approximation of what a real event looks like. In a lot of cases, effects don’t look real at all (what does a talking pig look like anyways?) they look the way you think reality would look. Get it? Or did I just blow your mind? What I’m driving at here is that a successful visual effect has to have a well thought out and unique existence all it’s own. In other word,s each VFX shot has a story to tell. Say you are tasked with designing the magic effects for the latest swords and sorcerers epic. Where do you start? Well, I’d advise not placing a single pixel until you’ve asked yourself the following questions. How does this magic spell work? What is the magic made of? Who brought the spell into being? The story of VFX sequence gives you a framework to build your artistic and technical achievements around. Visual effects without a beginning, middle and end can look like just a bunch of dancing lights with no cool-factor or emotional connection at all.
Be an obsessive observer
This is particularly important when you are working on a CG shot that simulates natural phenomenon. Take a look at the world around you and break down what you see into discreet actions. Working on a commercial for a beer company that needs CG bubbles created? Head on down to your local tavern and ask the barkeep to set you up with whatever is on tap. Wait! Don’t drink it. Watch the bubbles and mean really watch them. Where are they generating from, the bottom of the glass or the sides? What is the character of their motion as they travel through the liquid? Do bigger bubbles move in a different way than smaller ones? What happens when a bubble reaches to surface? Write down the answers to all these questions and bring them back to your workstation (after you finish the beer of course) and assemble the steps into a story of how each bubble is born, live and expires. Now you can get down to the brass tacks of breaking your story down into packets and generating vfx elements that describe them.
Create a flexible reality
Any VFX artist that has ever done a make-up fix or a rain enhancement shot (and that should be most of us) knows that there is a difference between reality and movie reality. The story you create with your work has to be dynamic and interesting, it is being created for entertainment after all. There are VFX people in this world who take the concept of “what would really happen” way to seriously. Take it from me, you don’t want to be one of these people. Listening to an half hour long diatribe on the way a spaceship would really fly or how a raindrop would really fall can cause a creative vacum strong enough to liberate your eyeballs from your skull. Don’t forget, a big part of your VFX story should cover how to make your effect cool and interesting. Getting too caught up in the physical reality of an event can cause you to miss the big picture.
Chart it up, write it down
A lot of times when you are brainstorming about how the elements of your VFX shot should come together, orgainizing your thoughts can be a little bit daunting. Scribbling notes on paper can be just to random and hard to decipher if you need to reference them later (especially if you have my handwriting). Creating an outline in a word processor can be too rigid and throw a big wet blanket on the old creative flow. Enter a little thing called Mind Mapping. First you get a big piece of paper and a bunch of colored pens or pencils. Write down the kind of effect you are trying to create in the center of the page, then just start free associating and writing down the components of the effect radially around the center. Then break it down further into sub-steps also arranges radialy around the new components. At any time start drawing lines and images connecting your ideas together. Use different colors and line weights to make connections. What quickly emerges is a visual organization of the effect. Mind maps are a great way to brainstorm and let the story of a visual effects emerge organically.
View your shots in context
As anyone whose gone to film school or watched the DVD extras on their favorite film will tell you, cinematic storytelling is about editing. Odds are that your VFX story will not be contained in one shot but play out over multiple cuts. It can therefore be extremely dangerous to work on individual shots without constantly checking to see how they look in the edit. Once you have a clear idea of the theory behind the VFX you are going to create it’s time to look at the cut sequence to see which parts of the effect work best for each shot. For example close-ups are a better showcase for the more subtle details of an effect while wide shots are great for accentuating broad motions. You also want to make sure that you effect builds properly from cut to cut and matches up with all the non-VFX reacation shots and cut-aways. I also suggest taking matters into our own hands when it comes to updating the edit. Instead of waiting for an editorial department to cut your stuff in for you quickly put the shots together yourself. You can use something as complex as Final Cut Pro or as simple as cutting and pasted clips in Quicktime. In any case, it’s essential to see how your shots play over time.
Don’t rely on suspension of disbelief
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, suspension of disbelief refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. This concept bodes well for the VFX artist (especially those of us who are often budgetarily challenged) but there’s a limit to everything. When a viewer enters a theater or fires up the Tivo they are entering into an implied contract with the makers of movie magic. It’s as if the viewer is saying “O.K. Mr. Visual Effects Man, go ahead and dazzle me. Just give me a little credit here. This isn’t a magic show for first graders.” Today’s audiences are more than willing to sit back and enjoy the ride as long as you have done your homework making sure that each shot makes sense on it’s own terms. If something is not working in the story of a visual effect it is not acceptable to just look at it and say “C’mon, suspension of disbelief dude!” There is only so far you can push a viewers imagination. And it’s easier than you think to tip the scales from awesome to suck. In other words, don’t be lazy and count on the gullibility of your audience to make your shot.
LINK to more info about how to make your own Mindmaps
[...] The Story Of A Visual Effect – Ideas Behind The Images Dec19 19 December 2007, nmancer @ 2:43 pm [...]