The Last Birthday Card is a short narrative film that Stu Maschwitz created while still working at Industrial Light & Magic. To provide examples, this article features stills from low-budget independent films that couldn't afford to create the kind of destruction required onscreen. The solution turned out to be varied: in some cases, to composite fire from scratch in others, to augment what was already there.
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The famous shot of the White House being blown to smithereens in Independence Day is one example, but this limitation was also very much in place on a little-known ABC-TV movie called Superfire, whose concept was articulated as "The Perfect Storm, but with fire." Infernos consuming acres of forest were central to the plot, and even if the budget had allowed for purchasing and razing hundreds of acres of wilderness, environmental concerns-not to mention horrendous PR-would in all cases argue against it. Compositing may be the key to making these shots work at all.Īnd, of course, sometimes a storyline calls for the destruction of something that cannot, in real life, be destroyed on any budget. Alas, there's no easy way to create realistic fire or explosions completely from scratch in After Effects, but that doesn't mean that these are off-limits they're hard to create on computers, period. Some effects require extra preparation of physical or fabricated elements, and all will benefit from your familiarity with good reference. I hope it's not disappointing that not everything pyrotechnical can be accomplished start-to-finish in After Effects. After that, it's heat distortion, fire, and explosions.
From there, you'll move on to the science-fiction equivalent of gunplay: weapons of pure energy, such as the Star Wars blaster and lightsaber or the Star Trek photon torpedo.
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You'll learn how to create those effects in After Effects as well.
Equally tricky and dangerous on set are explosive bullet hit squibs-small explosives that must be rigged and exploded by an on-set special effects technician, lest anyone damage soft body tissue. At the risk of sounding glib, it's indisputable that compositing could save a life in this scenario.Īnd gunfire is only where this article begins. The death of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow, when a gun loaded with blanks shot an empty cartridge (still in the barrel from a previous shot) into his abdomen, was fully preventable-not only by a more attentive arms or prop master, but by never loading the gun in the first place. Blowing stuff up on set is fun, but it involves extensive setup and a not insubstantial amount of danger to the cast and crew, and often you get only one take to get it right.Īs a director, I would never subject actors to real gunfire and bullet hits on set unless it was clearly the only way to get the image. The craft of the on-set pyrotechnician is not obsolete by any means, but these days there are many, many cases (particularly the smaller, more common ones) in which compositing can save a lot of time and expense at the shoot, no matter what the budget of the production is. This article focuses on effects that have traditionally been re-created live on set or via practical elements such as miniatures.
Creating fire effects entirely on the computer might not be as much fun as being an on-set pyrotechnician, but hey, keeping these people busy with either job is better than letting them loose on society at large. I've become convinced that a significant number of people first became interested in visual effects work because they qualify as borderline pyromaniacs. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. This article is adapted from " by Mark Christiansen.
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