Fun with a meat cleaver

Andrew and I are heading for a film festival in Ballycastle this Satuday, to deliver a presentation about our filmmaking exploits - specifically the area of doing special effects with little or no money. We’re in the process of preparing some material. I thought I’d share this semi-successful experiment we tried yesterday …

Turn your actors into ghosts

You know the special effect I’m talking about: somebody walks across the room, and you can see right through them. It’s an easier effect to produce than you might realise. All you need is a tripod and some video editing software that allows you to layer two video tracks on top of each other whilst controlling the opacity level of each (i.e. how much you can see through the image). If that’s a bit of a mouthful for you, let me explain.

First, set the tripod up nice and steady. Tighten all the adjusters so that it won’t move during, or after, recording (this is very important). Now, have your actor walk across the room in front of the camera. When you’ve finished the shot, film exactly the same shot without the actor.

For editing, I use a great little budget video editor called Serif Movie Plus. After you’ve captured the two shots into your computer, position them each on separate tracks so that they will both play at the same time. Of course, no magic will happen yet; the computer can only play one video at once … until you adjust the opacity level of the shot with the actor so that the shot becomes partially see-through. What do you think will happen to all the bits and pieces of scenery in your shot? Absolutely nothing, becuase the shot behind this shot contains exactly the same scenery. But what will happen to the actor? You will see the scenery through him.

You can also experiment with cross-fading the two shots together, which will produce an effect just like the TARDIS taking off or landing.

Two other things are important for an effect like this to work. (1) The camera is not allowed to move, so you’ll have to live with a static shot; no pans or zooms. (2) Nothing (except the actor) is allowed to move. You may have trouble filming outdoors if there are plants and bushes blowing in the wind, or moving traffic. In the little video I’m about to show you, notice how carefully the ghost gets up from her seat.

Here it is, a little test movie made by the school filmmaking club …

[ Play Movie ]

No green screen? No problem

Green screen (or blue screen, which used to be more common) is a method of transforming the entire background behind an actor into something else, usually something so elaborate that it couldn’t be done using ordinary props on a set. Much of the modern Star Wars trilogy was filmed in this manner. It’s actually a fairly simple process, but requires some technology. Basically it involves actors acting in front of a big green sheet hanging from the wall. The main consideration is making sure the actor is not wearing anything green, because later you’ll get the computer to remove all traces of green from the picture so that it becomes essentially see-through. The computer is then able to fill the entire stage behind the actor with anything you wish; usually it’ll be some elaborate vista created with animated computer graphics.

For the purposes of the 2003/04 Film Club at Clounagh Junior High, we needed to show the school in the wake of a bomb blast. Forget about green screening for a moment. First things first: how do you show a demolished building without demolishing the building? Having some experience with Adobe Photoshop, I showed the kids how to use the Clone Stamp tool, and let them loose with a digital photo of the school. I chose the best result, then I imported the photo into Apple iMovie and applied the program’s smoke effect. Presto. One minute (or whatever length desired) of usable footage of a school in ruins.

We could have used the footage as it stood, and simply cut away to the actors’ faces, but I was determined to make the thing look as real as possible, and that meant showing actors in front of the wreckage. I cast my mind back to the days before green screening, to memories of those old movies where you’d be looking directly at the driver of a car. You’d see him moving the steering wheel left and right - rarely in proper time to the weaving of the road behind him, because, of course, the road isn’t real. The car is on a set, and there’s a projector behind it, out of sight, beaming an image of the road onto a screen. And that is exactly what we did at Film Club.

In the photo, between the two girls, just out of sight below waist level, is a multimedia projector connected to a laptop computer. Windows Media Player is playing the clip of the school we made earlier. The projector is projecting it onto a screen not more than four feet in front of the girls. My camcorder is about six feet behind them, and I’ve zoomed in just enough to avoid seeing the edges of the projector screen. Our actresses don’t have a lot of freedom to move. If one of them so much as raises a hand, it’ll go in front of the beam and cast a massive shadow onto the screen. But they can look at each other and talk, and it’s enough to complete the illusion. If your scene requires more movement, you can consider back projecting, but unfortunately our screen was too thick to allow that.

The final ingredient - and it’s easily overlooked - is the sound. I went outdoors and recorded a minute of outdoor ambience - wind, birds, traffic, etc. - and layered this onto the scene at the editing stage. If you listen carefully to the girls’ voices, you can tell by the reverberations that they’re not really outdoors, but on a budget as tight as ours (i.e. zero), you can only go so far (egg boxes all over the walls is something to consider, if you’re inclined to go the extra mile).

To watch the finished effect, download the movie (WMV, 10.6 Mb), the appropriately titled School’s Out!

The poor man’s dolly

A dolly is a piece of equipment that allows you mount a camera on a set of tracks and push it along, creating super-smooth movement. Naturally, Midnight Pictures doesn’t have one, so we improvise. On the evening that we were filming the closing shot of Don’t Look in the Attic, Andrew brought a big blue trolley to the set. We tried putting the camera and tripod on it and pushing it along, but it was a disaster. The camera was sitting too high for the shot; the trolley’s wheels kept mis-steering; the resulting picture was none too steady.

But sometimes, if you just open your eyes and look for a simple solution, you find one. Smooth floor, not exactly slippy enough for movement, but with the camera set atop an upside-down bathroom mat - bingo! Of course, you’ll hear the mat dragging, so you have to forget about recording the sound, but that can sorted out later during editing. Check out the close of the movie to see this camera shot in motion. I think it worked pretty well.

"Meat cleaver in shoulder" effect

Ouch! Don’t you just hate it when somebody comes up to you and sticks a meat cleaver in your shoulder? What’s the world coming to?

Obviously this is one of Midnight Pictures’ special effects, courtesy of Andrew Harrison. I’ve decided to start blogging about the tips & tricks of filmmaking-on-the-cheap that Andrew and I have learned in our many years of experience as low-budget filmmakers.

We’ve borrowed this one from the master, Tom Savini. First, you need a suitable implement such as a cleaver or axe - something with a reasonably wide blade. Then you need someone who has the kind of equipment that can cut through the blade. You get them to cut an oval shape out of it. Then all you have to do is press the gap against a suitable part of your body, and with the help of a little stage blood, presto! For our effect, we also drilled a couple of small holes in the cleaver, one on each side of the gap, allowing us to tie on some elastic and feed it under my armpit to prevent the cleaver from falling off.

A more elaborate variation on this effect can be seen on Dawn of the Dead (1970s version), where one of the bikers slams the blade of his machete into a zombie’s forehead. Here’s how to make the motion convincing: start the shot with the blade already embedded in the forehead, then have the actor pull it away very quickly. The editor then plays the shot in reverse, and it looks as if the machete cuts right into the zombie’s head. The final touch is to quickly move on to another shot before you need to show the blood spurting.

Zombie Genocide fans will be confused about what the above photograph relates to, because “Doc” (i.e. me) is clearly a lot older than he was in that film. Well, a couple of years ago, Andrew and I recorded a trailer for an as-yet-unmade film entitled Shadow of the Dead. We’ve kept fairly quiet about this project. There are no firm plans to make it, but it’s the one Andrew and I keep talking about.