Stuff You Should Know - Special Effects: A Short History

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

Special effects have been around since the first movies. In fact, the techniques the earliest filmmakers created are still around today, we just use computers to do them faster and cheaper. Put on your beret and get ready for SYSK film class. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, stuff you should know listeners, if you wanna come see us live, you've only got a couple of more cities this year that still have tickets, and that is Orlando and New Orleans. Yep, we'll be in Orlando on October 9th at the Plaza Live,

and we'll be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater the following night, October 10th. And friends, like Chuck said, you better go get your tickets. Go to sysklive.com for info and ticket links and everything you need to come see us. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark,

there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant wearing his Stone Tumble Pilots hat. And there's Jerry over there, she's not wearing any hats, she's got really cool hair. It's not Stone Tumble Pilots. It is too, I've seen the Stone Tumble Pilots hats before, and that's one. It is STP, because I bought two hats

at AutoZone yesterday. I have a Champion Spark Plug hat. Yeah, they have good hats. They really do. I was getting a battery and I was like, I want these two hats, it was a good year, Akron, Ohio, good year hat. Nice.

Which is where Emily's from. Sure. So I wanted that, and then I saw this STP hat. Stone Tumble Pilots. But I would get a Champion Spark Plug hat too, those are, that's great. Okay, I'll let you borrow mine anytime you want. Just got to give it back.

I don't know if I've ever seen you in a baseball cap. It's a weird jam. Is it? Not what you want to see. I've seen you in shorts like twice in 12 years. I keep the legs covered. I think one of them was when you came over to borrow my lawnmower.

I remember that, yeah. Like nine years ago. Sure, I've got to mow the lawn sometimes. Now things have changed, you can buy a lawnmower. Yeah. That's where we're at now, we can afford lawnmowers. I can wear shorts too. I actually have one of those plug-in lawnmowers.

I have a battery-powered lawnmower. Do you? Look at us stupid liberal hippies. Well, mine's battery-powered too, but you have to plug it in and charge it. Oh yeah, yeah. What kind do you have? I have the green one.

Yeah, I think they're all green. No, there's a blue one. Oh, I've got the green one too, the Sun Joe. No, but I have a Sun Joe pressure washer. Do you really, is it battery operated? No, you plug that in. I was going to say, I'll bet it just goes, like, tinkles out water.

But they do make plug-in lawnmowers, like it's not a battery, you just have a cord that you walk around with. And run over with your lawnmower. I guess they're called electric. Sure. But yeah, I got the better one, because I have so little grass now,

and we may be done, period, with grass. Oh yeah, that's right, you're zero-scaping. Well, we're definitely doing the front, but the back, it just got smaller and smaller, and my last lawnmower broke, so I was paying a guy to come cut it. I was like, why am I paying this guy to cut, to do a seven-minute mow?

There's just that one blade of grass that sees the lawnmower coming, it's like, oh, yeah. But then I went and got the battery one, because lawnmowers are terrible for the environment. Yeah, that's why I got it. They're one of the worst polluters. Battery powered one too. Yeah, we're both also aware that we are charging

our battery-powered lawnmowers with coal-fired power. Yes, we understand that. We know. I'm just talking about exhaust fumes. I don't even need one, I live in a condo, but I'm so dissatisfied with the landscapers that take care of the condo that I bought. Yes, I bought a lawnmower just to do the little patch

out in front of our building, so poor Momo doesn't get lawn grass against her junk when she's potting it. This is a great way to start this episode. So we're talking special effects, obviously. This has been lawn talk. We're talking special effects, Chuck. Yes, movie special effects, which,

boy, I mean, we could do 10 parts on this. This is kind of a big summation, because movie special effects can be everything from the movie that you walk out of saying, oh, that movie had no special effects when in fact it did. Yeah, wrong. Yeah, just tiny little things that you may not even notice to things that are almost whole cloth special effects,

like Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow. Yeah, or Sin City. Yeah, I like both of those. Yes, did you notice in Sin City, every single bit of the set was CGI? Yeah, and Sky Captain did it first. Yeah, a year before, huh? Yeah, every bit of that, it was a green screen movie.

I never saw it, was it good? It was interesting, like the look of it was amazing, and very much ahead of its time. Like real art deco, right? Yeah, for sure, I call it black and white, but it wasn't, it was just this really washed out color. But it looked awesome and was not bad. Nice, I'll have to check it out.

And I think the dudes that made that kind of quit making movies after that. It's a very unique story. Have you ever seen, this has nothing to do with anything, but have you seen The Changeling? George C. Scott? Yeah, sure. Oh my God. Did you just see that?

Yes, and I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever gotten chills more frequently from a movie than I did with that one. Changeling's great. It is genuinely, it's a genuinely scary ghost story. Like it is wonderful. Yeah, I miss George C. Scott too. Yeah, he's a good actor.

And I don't remember who the female lead was in there, but she was great too. It's been a while, I haven't seen it in many, many years. So anyway, special effects, let's try this again. Yes. We're gonna get derailed like every five seconds. That's okay. Effects are divided, and this is by the Grabster. He helped us out with this.

Ed's a big movie guy and horror movie sci-fi guy. Sure. So he probably enjoyed writing this one up. They're divided into three general categories, and this all has to do with where the effect is happening. It can be practical, which is in front of the camera, and that means it's a physical thing that's happening. I think that's what most people think of when they think special effects.

You think? Sure. Okay. By most people, I mean me. In-camera effects that happen inside the camera, and then post-production effects. And many times you're using one or all three of these. Right, right. So with practical effects, it's things like makeup and prosthetics.

Like Ed uses the example of David Lynch as the elephant man. Like the prosthetic makeup that was used to turn John Hurt or John Hurt. Which one? Hurt. Into Joseph Merrick. Yes. That's a special effect. An explosion on set. That's a special effect. A blood packet to make it look like somebody just got shot

in the chest. A squib. That's a special effect. All three of those are practical effects. They're actually happening in the physical world in front of you on set, being captured on film. That's a practical special effect. Yeah, and the other one I wanted to mention there that you might not think of is stuff like

if there is a fire, like a fireplace in a scene, and then you flip the camera around to show the people, and you see that fire shimmering on the wall. That's a practical effect too, little things like that. But it's lighting, it's a lighting effect. Yeah, or it's a fire. Like, you know, those aren't real fires. I mean, it's real fire.

Somebody should put that out. But it's not like someone lights a bunch of wood. They put fake wood, and then you have these fire bars that it's like what you have under your grill basically. Right, or like a- And they hide those, and then that's your fire. Sure. Because it has to look perfect.

You can't just chance somebody not being able to start a fire or looking wonky. That's why movie fires look perfect. Yeah. Because they're fake. They are kind of dreamy. They're so good. So in-camera effects is just basically

messing with the way the film is being produced inside the camera. Not what's going on in reality, the film is capturing, but how the film is actually capturing this stuff. Yeah, slow motion is a special effect in-camera special effect. Yeah, or fast motion too, which is 10 times more hilarious than fast motion,

if you ask me. Like where would the monsters be without fast motion? Yeah. You know? Or Benny Hill, for God's sakes. Sure. That lived and breathed on fast motion. What else can you do there?

You can, and we'll see this some of the early special effects, like stopping the film, changing something, starting it again. Right, like bewitched appearing out of nowhere. Yeah, that's a special, in-camera special effect. Yeah, one thing that struck me about all this from researching this is how the basis, the foundation for special effects was laid immediately

upon motion pictures being created, like the whole industry, not even the industry, before the industry existed, but basically after the invention of motion pictures, and that it stayed virtually the same until the 90s. People refined it and got better at it, and techniques got more- So the same general crafts were used.

Very much so. Which is why craft service is called craft service. Oh, yeah. Because each department is their own craft. Oh, I didn't know that. And they're there to serve them, pizza rolls. Yeah. Man.

For whatever. You can put on some weight filming something. I'll tell you that for a second. Oh, my God. So stop motion animation, that is an in-camera effect. You're moving a little clay figure, or whatever, a doll, or a King Kong. A raisin?

One, a California raisin. One frame at a time, 24 frames per second. Can you imagine? Didn't you do that with your brother, with G.I. Joe? I did, and then years later, I did a little Star Wars thing when I got a high-eighth video camera, and spent like three days working on something

that ended up being nine seconds long, and I said, I'm done. What's funny is you're gonna get a cease and desist later from Lucasfilm after talking about this in the podcast. I might. And then we have post-production effects, and that is, I think that's what a lot of people think of, the special effects these days.

Really? Because that's all the CGI stuff that you will see as all happens in post-production. Okay, all right, yes, these days, I gotcha. All like, almost all special effects happens in post these days, right? Well, no, they still combine some of the old crafts as well, but yeah, surely a lot of it is CGI.

I mean, computers can do some amazing stuff. They can. I mean, stuff that used to take months to do, a computer can do an hours now, and do it a million times better. Yeah. So depending on your taste, I should say. That's right.

So those are the big three, practical, in-camera, and post-production. And like I was saying, the basis of special effects was founded, like in the 19th century. Yeah. There were just some people who had kind of followed in a tradition of still photography.

Still photographers, by that time, had already figured out some cool stuff that you could do messing around with cameras, something like double exposure, where you take a picture of one thing, and then take a picture of another thing with the previously exposed film, and all of a sudden it looks like

there's a ghost looming behind you. That's right. Stuff like that. So out of the gate, when motion pictures were, started to become a little widespread, and people could afford them, and try messing around with them, they had a basis of trickery to begin with.

But there's a lot of stuff you can do with motion picture cameras that you can't do with still photo cameras, and they figured this out right away. Yeah, that first guy who's credited as the first special effect is Alfred Clark, and they don't have the year exactly right. It's either 93, that's 1893, or 1895.

He made a short film called The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he did that little stop trick. Like I was saying, you shoot something, you stop the camera, you replace it, or you remove something, and then you start the camera, and in real time, when you go to play it back,

it's seamless. Right. And in his case, did you look at it? Did you watch that one? No, I didn't see that one. It's, he uses a stop trick with Mary getting beheaded, and right when the axe is going to fall, he switches her out for a dummy,

then starts the camera back up, and he chops the dummy's head off. And it looks pretty good, like you can't, there's no big weird jump. He did, for 1893, he did a really good job. Yeah, and the key to that is just making sure that no one touches the camera or even breathes on it. Don't move.

And then getting the dummy in the same position as the actor. Yeah, and in fact, as we'll talk about later, with matte paintings, it's so crucial that the camera not move, that one technique was they used to bury the camera tripod, like a couple of feet into the earth. Makes sense.

Just to make sure, like, no dum-dum, PA bumps into it, like me. So Alfred Clark is credited with the first special effect, but a guy named Georges Melyse, did I get it, Melyse? We should go ask Casey Peckram. Oh yeah, he would know. I think it's Millier.

Oh, nice, I think he just nailed it. Georges Melyse, at any rate, this guy is known as the father of special effects. He was very early on doing stuff that no one else was doing. You know, granted, there were very few people working in this field at the time. None of the five people did.

But he was an illusionist, and he said, oh man, I can really do some amazing tricks with this camera, and he really put it to good use from a very early, like, I mean, turn of the last century. Yeah, he actually stumbled upon that little stop trick by accident when he was shooting a street traffic scene in Paris in 1896, the camera jams, while I think a bus

was coming across frame, he's like, mad, fixes the camera. Can we say that? Sure. All right. We don't have any French people listening. Yeah, that's true. Starts the camera back up, and of course,

there's different things happening, and then when he went back to look at it, it's, he just kind of just stumbled upon this weird little substitution splice that became part of filmmaking. Yeah, because by the time the camera had started up again, the bus was replaced by hers. So it looked like when he went back and watched it,

the bus suddenly transformed into a hers. And he said, wait, they get a load of bewitched. Yeah. 70-something years from now. Yeah. So, or no, I guess, what, was that in the 50s? 60s. 60s, all right.

So you may not recognize Georges Meliers, oh, I got it that time. I think so. Name, but you probably have heard of his work, like A Trip to the Moon. Yeah. What's very widely cited is like one of the first actual movies.

I think it was in the 20-something minute range, but it was about some explorers in the Victorian era, getting in a rocket and traveling to the moon and the rocket lands and the man in the moon's eye. Everybody's seen that. I don't care who you are. If you say you haven't, you have. This was the guy who made that.

And this was a very early movie, it was from 1902, but he was doing all sorts of amazing stuff. He was using extensive costuming, masks, all sorts of in-camera techniques. He was painting on film frames? Yeah, and this is 1902. And like I was saying, this stuff was refined, but it was the basis of special effects

for the next century to come. Should we take a quick break? I think so. All right, let's take a quick break and we will talk a little bit about the matte technique right after this. I'm actually pretty psyched about this. I wanna put that mask on right now, to my right.

Right? I'm a kiss doll wearing a turntable. I lovebuying election ghetto. I loveHKTV. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor. Stars of the cold, classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days

of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping-off point friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, as I said, I'm very psyched about the mat. Yeah, so this isn't, this is a little confusing

the way it's laid out here because what Ed's talking about here with Norman Don is called original negative matte painting. Okay. If you hear of a matte painting, that is a piece of glass where you have, and I'm gonna talk about the most common way you might see it employed,

is you take a big piece of glass and you paint like a cityscape on it, like really realistic. And then you put that in a scene and shoot it. So it's instead of having someone in front of a city, and this was pre-blue screen and green screen technology, you would just put Kurt Russell in Escape from New York in a field and there's a matte painting

of New York City behind him, and it looks great. And James Cameron painted that in Escape from New York. He was a matte painter. Oh, I didn't know that. That was like his first job. It's neat, like if you, even if you do know what Chuck's talking about, go to the internet and just look up like great matte paintings.

It's amazing. There's a lot of really wonderful ones. One you've seen before, ones you haven't, but basically any time you've seen a movie pre-1993, maybe 1990, where somebody walks into this enormous place or this amazingly elaborate future city or something like that,

what you're actually looking at is an expertly painted painting that has been messed with in post-production or using an in-camera technique to make it look like it's alive or actually bustling or energetic. Or there. It's really, it's a painting.

It's a painting that some amazing human being painted by hand. Yeah, and we should point out, they still do this today. They just do it digitally. And digital matte painters are super talented as well. Sure. But it's kind of neat to think about that old craft and James Cameron painting a piece of glass.

Yeah. And sticking that behind Kurt Russell. And I mean, it was used in everything. Like for my money, matte painting is the single most important and widespread special effect ever. Maybe hard to argue that. Thank you. Like it was in Mary Poppins

where Mary Poppins is coming into the city of London. Floating down. That's a matte painting. When Superman walks into the, where's the, what's the name of the place where he's from? Like the crystal cave where- Fortress of Solitude?

Yeah, is that where he talks with Marlon Brando, his dad? Yeah, I think so. Okay, that's a matte painting. And I think the Fortress of Solitude are the remnants of Krypton. Okay. And boy, Superman, people are so mad at me right now. Are there Superman people still?

I thought everybody was on the Marvel train. No, people love Superman. Really? Look at the comics. Oh, okay. Because I was gonna say, I mean, you've seen what they've done in Superman lately, right?

In Batman? Yeah. So that's the matte painting. And what that is, it's called set extension. So that basically means you're just sort of extending the real life set to make something bigger and more opulent. Gotcha. Or maybe not more opulent, just bigger and more.

Right. But here's the thing, relying on that matte painter and having the glass there and glass can break and it can, you know, on set with lighting can be weird. So that's all, can get a little hinky. So that's why this technique called original negative matte painting was developed by Norman Donne.

And that is when nowadays they'll use what's called the matte box, which is literally like black, I don't think it's cardboard these days, but whatever they make out of, a cardboard thing that you put over the lens to block out whatever you wanna block out. Back in the day, they would paint cardboard and hold it in front of the lens

or they would actually paint the lens. And what you're essentially doing is painting away, it was early green screen. You're painting away what you don't want in the frame or what you want in the future. And then adding that later on. Right, and because it's black or because it's covered, there's light is not hitting that part of the film.

That part of the film, the actual film strip itself that you're recording onto or filming onto, that's unexposed. All that gets exposed is the part of the lens or the camera that is not covered. That has say your actor, like doing the herky jerky dance. Right? And so what you do after that is you take that film

that has your actor doing the herky jerky dance, project it onto a screen so you see where the actor is. And on the screen, you literally paint the background that you want, then you film the whole thing a second time and now you have your actor in the set that you originally wanted. Right, the only difference there, which is something that wasn't quite right here

is they don't like project it, they just develop a few frames of it and project it like a slide. I got you. So it's not like the film is moving through on the wall because in the article here it says, and then you just stop it and what happens if you do that is the bulb burns the film.

So you can't just stop a movie projector. You produce like a slide of and project that. Yeah, and then you paint in the castle or the mountain or the whatever you want and then you go back and expose it again. Pretty neat. You just open your trench coat, there you go. And the big innovator with the original

negative matte painting was Norman Dawn and he really like really led the way. But I mean, again, most of the stuff that does this now is done by computers in post, but this is like the links people were going to to make movies at the time and you watch them today and you're like, God, it looks terrible. But if you stop and think about the effort

that they were going to. They were inventing techniques. Yeah, it's just mind boggling that they managed to get it to this point. Yeah, Norman Dawn tried to patent that technique as well, but they said, no, you did not invent this. You popularized it and you can't patent something that you made super popular.

Yeah, there's some other stuff too. There's like rear projection and front projection, which is basically like projecting the background, a moving background onto a screen behind the actors. Basically, you know, all those hokey driving scenes where the person's like the car's being rocked or whatever the road behind them, that's from a rear projection.

Yeah, and people still will use that as homage, like in Pulp Fiction, very famously Bruce Willis. Or I guess not. Yeah, when Bruce Willis gets in the cab after the fight. And if it looks old fashioned, that's because QT used rear screen projection for that. And there's also a technique that's not in here that I just remembered.

So I'm actually having to look up what it's called. When you're in a car scene, but you're not doing your rear screen projection. So what happens here is you're sitting in a car and a still car on the set, but they're not projecting anything behind you. What you've got is two people shaking the car out of frame. What are they, grips?

Oh yeah, usually a grip, but I've shaken cars and trains before. It's like, because I'm just a body on the set. Oh, I gotcha. Like get in there and shake that thing. In fact, one job I was on though is a fake subway train and the hydraulics broke early on. And they're like, bring out the PAs.

You're gonna shake this train for 12 hours. Say like, you got rhythm? Get in there. Yeah. Oh, we couldn't have too much rhythm because we got yelled at for that because it looked too rhythmic. Gotcha.

So we're like, I don't know what, I don't know how to do this. Who are you working for? Oh, it was just a commercial director. Gotcha. That said that our movement of the train looked too rhythmic and not believable. Right.

So anyway. This Fruit of the Looms commercial was totally unbelievable. You sit in the car, you're acting like you're driving. There's someone else shaking the car. There might be someone else off camera, like flashing a light through the car. Like you're going by a street light

or a headlight goes across their face and there may be fake rain in the background. And this is sometimes like six, seven, eight people working in concert to make it look like you're driving at night in the rain or something like that. Right. So there's not like an obvious background, trees or road or whatever,

but maybe there's headlights coming up behind you. It's just dark. Yeah, but they're people with a spotlight. Yeah. It's really, really cool. Old fashioned, but people still use that stuff. Yeah. And I wish I could remember the full name of that technique.

The, the shake and shimmy. It's, I'm going to be so mad later on. Well, let's just call it the shake and shimmy. Okay. That's right. So you talked about green screen and that's actually super old too. There's a really convoluted explanation

about how originally green screen employed sodium vapor lights, which would actually mess with the yellow exposure on panchromatic film. And my brain, I started bleeding out of my ear. I cannot tell you how many times I read descriptions about this and I can't quite get it. So suffice to say that that was one technique

for green screen, what really kind of changed the industry is when they figured out that again, if you, if you, if you film in black, the film is not going to be exposed. So anything you go and re-expose it to, it will cover over that stuff. So like it's transparent. So for example, in the Invisible Man from I think 1933.

1933, yeah. Claude Reigns wore a black bodysuit and the background was black, it was a black screen, like a black green screen. But he wore clothes and everything and bandages and sunglasses. I think he smoked a cigarette or whatever. But when he took the bandages off

and we took his sunglasses and clothes off, there was nothing there. It was a black bodysuit and a black background. So when they filmed the background later on, all you could see was the background and the clothes and the bandages. It looked like there was nothing there because as far as the film was concerned,

when they were filming it, there wasn't anything there. So the film wasn't exposed in those sections on each frame. That's right. And that's called the Williams process. And a key part of the Williams process is the optical printer. And that is a projector that actually prints an image directly onto the film that runs through the camera

while that printer and camera are synced up. Yes, so this is, to me, the optical printer is the second most widespread and useful special effect technique in the history of film. You just waved your hand. I did. So I suddenly had an ass gotten a beret on. Yeah, hard to argue that too.

But all this stuff was just precursor to what was blue screen early on, chroma key blue, and then later became chroma key green. I'm not sure why they made the switch, actually. Wow, neither. Other than maybe the green. Less prevalent or less used? I think so, probably.

Maybe the blue was, because you know what? You don't want anything close to that color will disappear against the green screen. Anyone who's ever done the weather on the newscast can tell you that. Yeah, there have been, there are blooper reels of weather people disappearing when they wear a green jacket or something. Right, it looks like the weather is going on through their body.

Same thing. So I want to say one more thing about optical printers or another little bit about it. So what you have is a projector projecting a film onto a screen, and you have a camera recording what's being projected, right? That's right. That's the optical printer.

And you could do all sorts of stuff with that. So let's say you have a shot where you have one mat in the foreground and live actor, and then another mat in the background that has a bunch of different people in it or something like that. Or stormtroopers. OK, so you've got three different elements to that shot. What you would do is using the same film, film each thing. So you go film that, like the actor, the live action actor,

you've got that on the film, and you project that, and you take film where you're filming the mat, and you project that and film that. I just totally have screwed this up. Oh my god, this is just like, oh, what was... The sun? No, it's worse than that. Was it false positives?

Do you remember that time where I was like, I took a pretty simple thing and just completely walked the dog with it? Yeah. OK, well, I just did that again. Everyone, I want you to go look up optical printers, read a little bit about them, and then you'll say, oh, Josh is right. Yeah, this stuff, stuff. It is, essentially you're filming a projection,

and you can do that multiple times with the same film, and it adds up to where you have the shot you wanted, where it makes it look like all these things that you filmed three separate times are all happening together in one space. Yes, you are marrying separate images together onto a single piece of film. Right, you couldn't do that before optical printers, which is a projector and a camera working together. That's right.

OK, I think. I needed that. We should mention briefly motion-controlled cameras. This is a system that allows... It's basically taking the person out of the equation. There is not a person pushing a dolly, there is not a person moving the camera. It is a machine that is programmed to move a camera through space

very, very precisely and exactly the same every single time. Yeah, so you can do the exact same motion over and over again. Over and over, and a lot of times, if you're on a TV commercial, as boring as that is, you will see stuff like this for like a food shoot, because food shoots are notoriously tricky, because everything's super close up and has to be perfect, and you can't be off a little bit with a camera, because a lot of times you'll sub in stuff later in post, and that's the whole reason for motion control,

is to replicate moves with exact precision. So, I was reading about industrial light and magic using this to really great effect with the first Star Wars, which is Episode IV, right? The New Hope. That's the first one, right? I'm not confirming or denying anything. I'm just going to let that stand.

Episode IV is the first Star Wars movie that ever came out, correct? The Star Wars of New Hope is the first episode that I ever saw in a movie theater. Because that's the first one that ever came out. Anyway, when they were making this, you know, is it a Star Destroyer? The big daddy ships? Okay. Oh man, we're going to get murdered. Everything, all of the ships in Star Wars were models.

Yes. Fairly small models, actually. You got that part right. They weren't the biggest. Okay. I think it was Episode IV. I'm almost positive. Okay.

So, those models were not moving in these shots, and these enormous, like, huge panoramic shots where, like, there's TIE fighters flying around, shooting everything, and X-Wing fighters shooting the TIE fighters. None of those models were moving. What happened was they figured out how to use motion control cameras so that the camera would go through the shot around the model and make it look like the model was moving,

and plus it was moving the shot through space, right? Right. The thing is, is let's say you have five different ships. You film those five ships separately, but those five ships are all going to be in the same shot. So, you have to film that same shot the exact same way, five different times, and then run it through an optical printer so that you can get all of them,

all five shots, onto the same strip of film. But that's one of the ways that motion control cameras were really put to good use, and it was extremely groundbreaking, because not one of those ships were moving in reality when they were filming Star Wars. Can you name five Star Warships? TIE fighter, X-Wing fighter. You already said one.

You were right. TIE fighter two. The deuce is what the people in the know call it. Sure. You already said Star Destroyer. So, Star Destroyer was right. Yeah, there's a Star Destroyer. Okay, you made a face like I was just totally off.

You can make the case that Endor was a ship, even though it was a planet. There was the Forest Speeder, the pod racer, and Dr. Zeiss. That's right, he's a final ship. Yeah. Do you have many people?

Oh boy. Their calf muscles just popped right out of the backs of their legs. Holly Fry is hyperventilating somewhere in the office and she doesn't know why. So, as I said earlier, it's usually a combination of these different techniques to create one overall special effect using these different crafts.

And a great example is Jurassic Park in the scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen. That great, great sequence when it was playing cat and mouse with those children. There were puppets. There were actors in costumes. There were animatronic raptor heads. And there were full CGI raptors

and you throw this all in a hat, mix it all up, and it comes out to be like a really believable looking scene. Yeah, it comes out as an Oscar. Yeah, I'm sure they won Oscars, right? They had to have. I don't know, but there's just no way. It was groundbreaking.

I remember being just gobsmacked in the movie theater when I first saw those dinosaurs walking across the screen. It was 1993, I believe, for the first Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park, A New Hope, the first one that came out. But that was five years after the first Oscar had been awarded for special effects, as far as I know. Oh, really? I believe that the Abyss was the first one to win an Oscar

for special effects, maybe? No, no, I'm sorry, I'm way off, way off. The Abyss was the first movie to win a special effect for a CGI effect. Remember the water? It still looks pretty good. It looks amazing, and this is 1987 we're talking about. Wow, was that when that came out?

Yeah, I was surprised to see that, too, because I thought it was a good movie. I really like that movie. How do you not like Ed Harris? What did you not like Ed Harris? No, I like him as an actor. I think a lot of people might have problems with Ed Harris as a person. He's notoriously cantankerous. I've never heard that, I believe it.

Sure, he looks like he could yell somebody down, doesn't he? Sure. But he also keeps a cool head when he's an actor, as a 70s or 60s NASA guy. Hey, I love Ed Harris. All right, let's take another break, and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about Star Wars Episode, whatever, right after this.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,

wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we're back. And we should talk, uh, we should mention the garbage, Matt, real quick. Okay. Because that is, uh, that is a big deal. Sometimes you have wire work or you have, um, you have things hanging from wires. It doesn't have to be a person. It can be like a model plane or a tie fighter or whatever.

Sure. You got to get rid of those wires. Unless you're Ed Wood. You can't have fish in line. No, you're supposed to not, but yes. Or if you're Charlize Theron and Mad Max Fury Road, you got to get rid of that arm. Or if you're in forced gump, you got to get rid of Lieutenant Dan's legs. Man, that was amazing.

That was the first time anybody's ever done really something like that throughout. Yeah. I have my problems with that movie, for sure. And one of them is, I think he way over, he was like a kidney candy store and way over did the, like, and now forest is in the White House and using archival footage and sticking forest in it. Yeah. That whole like half hour dialogue he has with Peter Cushing's ghost.

It was uncanny. But I get it, I get why these filmmakers get excited, these really technical wizards, when they get a new technique and they just hammer it. The guy from Industrial Light and Magic when they made the first Star Wars, call it what you will. His name was, I think, John Dykstra and this motion controlled camera assembly that they created was called Dystra Flex. It was super groundbreaking and they really did amazing stuff with it.

Well, he's like a legend in this industry now. And I saw an interview with him recently and he was like, I'm so tired of seeing just whole cities leveled in like just the most amazing stuff you can possibly think of being done just because we can do it. Right. He put it really, really well, I think. It's an embarrassment of riches. Yeah.

You know? Totally. Like it can be done so it's being done. Everybody's doing it. And it makes it less amazing. Not necessarily because it looks bad. It just keeps looking better and better every time. Yeah.

Like if you look at Charlie's Theron's prosthetic arm or missing arm compared with Lieutenant Dan's missing legs. Looks radically different. It does. So it's getting better. There's just too much of it, I think, is the point. Just to be all ed heresy on this. No, I have long predicted a return to practical effects.

And it's starting to happen a little bit more and more. Yeah, I could see starting with indie filmmakers. Yeah, for sure. Which is funny because finally computer generated effects have trickled down enough. Yeah. Like you or I could just walk out of the studio and probably get on any one of those Macs out there and use stuff that 10, 15 years ago would have cost $500,000 to set up a rig like that.

Yeah. And what filmmakers have gotten noticed is by making these short films with like zero money on their computer that get a lot of action on YouTube because it looks so amazing. Right. And the studio will be like, sign that person up. Yeah. I can't remember the guy's name, but that's happened a couple of times in recent years. The Ed Harris.

We should talk about a few of the groundbreaking people over the years. Oh, yes. We'll go through these a little quicker than what we have in front of us, I think. Yeah. We should mention Lon Cheney. Sure. One of the original superstars of film in the silent era, the man of a thousand faces. He was very talented doing his own makeup and changing his face.

That's why he's called the man of a thousand faces. Right. He's like, here's 997. What about Willis O'Brien? He was one of the pioneers of stop motion photography. Again, if you're a California Racins fan, you have a lot to thank Willis O'Brien for. Yeah. He also, dude, the stuff he did.

I mean, if you look back, he did King Kong in the 1933 King Kong. Yeah. And if you look back at this, you're like, this is cool, but if you research what was done to create this, you're just blown away by it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think the Nazis coming together to create that 1933 version of King Kong. And that fight looks good still. I mean, it doesn't look realistic, but consider the year. It looks awesome.

It does. And it's about three, three and a half minutes long King Kong fighting the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But it took seven weeks to film. Yeah. Because there's 24 frames shot per second in a film. That's right. For every frame, they moved the models a little bit here or there. Yeah.

So that's why it took seven weeks just for that fight scene. I think it was 55 weeks for all of the stop motion photography that was done in that movie. Yeah. That's impressive. It really is impressive, especially when you realize the trouble they went to when you go back and watch it. Like this is pretty nuts. Yeah. Ray Harryhausen continued the work of Willis O'Brien.

And very famously in like the 50s and 60s with movies like Jason and the Argonauts. And Clash of the Titans. Yeah. Remember Medusa? Sure. Scary lady. Yeah. That had to be toward the end of his career, I guess, because that was in the 80s.

Yeah. I think like 81 maybe. Remember the Minotaur 2, man? That was cool movie. That was a big movie for me as a kid. Yeah. And that was like when LA Law came along, I was like, I know that guy. That's right.

There's the Titans guy. We should shout out Millicent Patrick. This is a very interesting story. She was one of the only, well, first and only women working in special effects back in the day. Right. And she created the very famous mask of the Gilman from Creature from the Black Lagoon in the mid-1950s. And was unceremoniously fired. Not just fired stricken from the credits.

Yeah. This guy named Bud Westmore. He assisted her and then basically had her fired rather than give her the credit for the mask, which he would take credit for. Because I think he was the supervisor in charge of effects or costume or something. Oh, I thought, I guess he assisted her, but he was her boss. Yeah. Okay. But like she very clearly on her own came up with the Gilman for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

And this has only come out in the last like few years. They've kind of dug up the original stuff. And yeah, sexism just basically pushed her out of the industry altogether. Yeah. Very sad. She's starting to get her do now though, which is good. Yeah. That is very good.

There's Dick Smith is amazing. He created the squib. Oh, really? Yeah. He's a very famous makeup artist. He's really good at making people look aged. Yeah. He made a 47 year old Marlon Brando look much older.

45. Than the godfather. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was a year younger than me. That's crazy. I never thought about that. Wow.

He really is good. He also did Death Becomes Her, which is one of the all time great movies. Oh, yeah. For sure. And The Exorcist. Yep. And Scanners. And have you ever seen Ghost Story from 1981?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very scary movie. The old dudes. He did that. What else? Very famously aged Dustin Hoffman and Little Big Man by many, many years. Sure.

And in the last like 25, 30 years, Rick Baker and Stan Winston. Stan Winston's, he's got my vote. Yeah. I mean, these two guys were both just creative leaders in the industry and trailblazers in the industry. And as Ed says in here, like a mentor to a generation of special effects employees, employees, creators, artists. Sure.

All three of those work. Lord. Gig workers. Rick Baker, American Werewolf in London in 1981, which still holds up. The thriller video in 1983, Star Wars, Mos Eisley Cantina. He made all those. Yeah. Did you know that about the Mos Eisley Cantina?

Sure. I didn't know that. He was almost single-handedly responsible for all of them. And then Stan Winston, you got to talk about movies like The Thing and Predator and Terminator. And they both have set up, you know, foundations and schools and things like that. Yeah. Stan Winston also did the makeup for what I think is maybe the best slasher film of all time, Friday the 13th part two.

Yeah. Two is when Jason comes along, right? Yes. It's Jason. Before he got his mask, he gets his mask in three. I think the Friday the 13th franchise is as good as it gets for horror movies. I dropped off at a certain point. Did you see all those?

No, no. I still haven't seen all of them, but even just putting like the first five or six up. Yeah. And I think it's like watching them again as an adult, I'm like, these are really good slasher films. Yeah, scary. Like even better than I remember for me and a kid. Yeah.

And the reason Stan Winston filled in for Friday the 13th part two is because the guy who did Friday the 13th, the first one, Tom Savini, was unavailable. He was off doing Creepshow, I believe, but Tom Savini is another legend. I think they're redoing Creepshow. Are they? Oh, okay. I'd watch that. Different stories.

Oh, even better. I'm not mistaken. Nice. But yeah, Savini is well known for being sort of the godfather of gore. Yeah. He did maniac. Did you ever see that? Yeah.

That was an off the rocker movie. And then these days there are companies, ILM and Weta, ILM, Industrial Light and Magic is Lucas' company. And they're cool because they invented this stuff because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done. Right. Right. Go figure out how to do it.

And they did. They really did. And then Weta is Peter Jackson's company. Oh, okay. And he's the one that has really pioneered the mocap, the motion capture techniques. Where a person's wearing like a suit and the suit has a bunch of different kind of like almost ping pong balls all over it at like joints and crucial places where the body moves and the actor, stunt person or dancer, whoever wearing the suit goes through the motions.

And then- They're just going through the motions. Sure. And those motions, what's captured is fed into a computer and the computer generates a character doing all those same motions, creating the performance, but it's a computer generated character. Yeah. I don't think he was the first, but the Gollum character in those Lord of the Rings movies was really one of the first really terrific looking, fully CGI character.

Yeah, I found, from what I could tell, the first full CGI character ever in a movie. You want to guess? You'll never guess. Well, I mean, it's touted as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Wrong. Really? Mm-hmm. What is it going to be?

It's another Spielberg movie. Okay. It's Young Sherlock Holmes. What was- Do you remember the stained glass knight that comes to life and tries to slash one of them with his sword? Uh-huh. First full CGI character in a movie.

Well, why? I don't know, but that's what I could find, and that one's from 1985. Well, it says maybe it's in the nitpicky language because in the Last Crusade, when Walter Donovan's face melts and turns to dust when he drinks from the chalice. That's in Raiders of the Lost Ark, isn't it? Oh, no, you're right. You're right. I'm sorry.

Okay, yeah. It's a digital composite of a full-screen live-action image. There's something in the language there because maybe it was a full-screen or something. This was the- Gotcha. This was the first CGI. But it wasn't the first CGI image. This was the first moving CGI image.

The first CGI image was in Looker. Remember that movie? I totally saw Looker. Yeah. That was a big HBO movie for me. For sure. Same here. It was Looker, Runaway, Crawl.

It was Runaway. It's Tom Selleck. Yeah. And Gene Simmons is the bad guy. Yeah. That's right. I saw Crawl a lot, too. Yeah.

Looker had Albert Finney, right? If I remember correctly. Albert Finney and Susan Day. Yeah. Susan Day. Yeah. Written by Michael Crichton, I think. That was the first full-body 3D human, but it did not move.

It was static. Yeah. And the very first computer-generated effects period, funny enough, were used to replicate computer screens. So whenever you would see a computer screen in, like, Westworld or Aliens or Star Wars, and they were like, what is the computer going to look like, you know, not now? That was the first time they used computer-generated imaging was to make a fake computer screen. And the first full CGI scene ever done was in the Wrath of Khan, which I believe came

out in 1982. But there's a genesis, like Earth being, you know, like cooling and turning into the Earth and there's these amazing shots around it. That's all CGI and that was the first one. And Tron. Oh, yeah. I thought for sure Tron would have been among the first. Apparently most of that was animated by humans, not computers.

That's right. Like all the glowing lines, all that stuff, animated, which makes it nuts that they were able to create that. Yeah. Now the big thing is this de-aging technique that they're getting better and better. Yeah, they really are. Yeah. And the new Scorsese pick, the Irishman, I think de-ages and it has taken a long time

to get out because the de-aging didn't look good enough for Scorsese. So they have de-aged denaro. And then I saw this new Ang Lee movie, Gemini Man, where Will Smith of now he plays an assassin and he has to go kill his younger self. Looper. Yeah. Sort of like Looper, I guess. But this Gemini Man script has been in development for like 25 years with various people attached

but they can never do it. Because of the technology, wasn't it? Yeah. It's finally here. But here's the thing I didn't know. Like I've seen this trailer and I'm like, man, that de-aging looks great. They didn't de-age him. It is a fully CGI Will Smith.

When it looks that realistic. The younger version is, yeah. Wow. Because I was like, man, they're getting so good at the de-aging. Wow. That's amazing. So he mo-capped his whole performance, motion captured and they just used fresh prints photos. Man, they just basically deep faked him.

Sort of. Prints photos. Have you seen the Bill Hader deep fake that's going around now? It's pretty cool. Yeah. Because he goes from Hader to Tom Cruise to Seth Rogen. Back to Tom Cruise. It's like kind of all over the place.

Yeah. It's really creepy. It's really well done. And then, you know, like we said, they use CGI for so many movies, little mistakes that can be corrected, little things that it's just much cheaper to add digitally later on. It could be a movie that, like I said, looks like it has no CGI whatsoever and is cheaper to put a plate of food in the background digitally than cook the food and put it on set, which is, that's a bad example.

Or you can color grade a movie. You completely change, like the movie O Brother Where Art Thou has that yellow hue for everything. All that stuff is green, you know, they're in the deep south in the summertime. Right. And they used to have to like film it at some weird exposure and then project it at another exposure with some filter and then record the whole thing on an optical. The negative. Yeah.

Now they can just do it all with the computer easy peasy. It's great. Do you have anything else? I'm kind of looking around, but this is like one eighth of this topic. Yeah. Hopefully it made you appreciate movies more. Yeah. You specifically.

Me? I know you love the movies. Sure. If you want to know more about movies, go listen to Chuck's podcast, Movie Crush. You'll love it. Hey, thanks. And since I said Movie Crush, it's time for Listener Mail. And actually, since you said Movie Crush, we're about to release an episode on the Matrix.

Oh, yeah. Hadn't seen that movie. It's been 20 years since it came out. You've never seen the Matrix? No, I hadn't seen it in a long time. I got you. But I didn't realize this is the 20 year anniversary. Watched it last night.

Still totally holds up. Really? Looks great. Fun. Well-acted by most of the cast members. Who didn't act well? Oh, you know, Keanu always gets picked on. I love that guy.

I know Kung Fu. He's perfect in that role, though. Yeah, he's great. I can't imagine anybody else in it. It'd be too just too serious, I think. Like imagine Tom Cruise in that, in the Matrix. Yeah, you're right. He adds a little like something light, doesn't he?

Yeah, it makes it a little more every man, almost a little more believable in a weird way. Do you see those John Wick movies? I've seen some of it. It's just like a little too video gamey for me. But I mean, it's fine. I respect that people like it. Sure.

Here we go. Okay. This is about 3D. 3D? It's about solar panels. I got movies on. Where'd you get 3D? Well, they are in 3D, I guess.

Okay. I got movies on the brain. Hey guys, being a roof for my entire life, I never thought I'd have much input until now. It's my time to shine. One thing that wasn't mentioned in the solar panel episode is that people really need to consider the age of their existing roof before installing solar panels. Oh, that's a good point.

A new residential single roof should last about 30 years. But if the roof isn't nearly new, I would not suggest installing solar panels. And definitely don't install it if the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Once the panels are installed, roof repairs or replacement is very difficult and much more expensive, if the life of the roof ends before the solar panels die, you can easily add 50 to 75% or more to the cost of the re-roofing due to the added labor cost to remove and reinstall the panels. What?

Now you may error. Yeah, didn't think about that. So you should align it ideally with your new roof. Sure. I do mostly commercial roofing, can't tell you the number of customers who I talked to had solar panels on an old roof and are now paying through the nose for repairs or replacement. Several solar panel specialists should have this roof conversation with a potential customer before installing the panels.

I'm afraid it doesn't always happen or customers underestimate the added re-roofing cost once they're installed. Man, this is a great PSA. It is. Thanks again for what you guys do. I'm in my truck a lot driving to different job sites and it's always easier on Tuesday through Thursday when I have a new stuff you should know. And that is from Owen Sinsenig.

What's your name? First and last. Yep. Love the name, Owen. Stephen King's kid's name. Really? Yeah. Owen King.

Thanks a lot, Owen. We appreciate that big time. That was a great email. I would have never thought about that. And he didn't even send his business in to be plugged, so just Google his name and roofing and if he happens to live near you, use him. That's how dedicated this guy is. He sounds honest.

Well, if you want to be a cool person like, Owen, you can get in touch with us. And go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.