Hey, everybody, it's Josh. For this week's select, I've chosen our episode on Special Effects from September twenty nineteen. It's just a nice, straight ahead sysk app from Chuck the Grabster and me. If you're into movies, this is gonna be a good one for you, so enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant wearing his Stone Temple Pilot's hat, and there's Jerry over there. She's not wearing any hat. She's got really cool hair.
It's not Stone Temple Pilots.
It is too. I've seen the Stone Temple Pilots hats before and that's.
What 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, oh, on these two hats. It was a good Year you're in Ohio Goodyear hat nice, which is where Emily's from. Sure, so I wanted that, and then I saw this STP.
Hat Stone Temple Pilot.
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. I 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 now? What you want to see?
I've seen you in shorts like twice in twelve years.
I keep the legs covered.
And 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, and now we can afford lawnmowers.
I can wear shorts too. I actually have one of those plugin lawnmowers.
I have a battery power lawnmower. Dude, look at us, stupid liberal hippies.
Well mine's battery power 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.
Now there's a blue one.
Oh, I've got the green one too.
The sun Oh no, but I have a sun Joe pressure watcher.
Do you really is it battery operated.
No, you plug that in.
I was gonna say, I bet it just goes like tinkles out water.
But they do make a plug in lawnmowers, Like it's not a battery. You just like have a cord that you walk around.
And run over with your lawnmower.
I guess they're called electric sure, but yeah, I got the batterym because I have so little grass now and we may be done period with grass.
Oh yeah, that's why you're zero escaping.
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. It's like, why am I paying this guy to cut to do a seven minute mo?
There's just that one bladed grass that sees the lawnmower coming.
Like yeah, But then I went and got the battery because lawnmowers are terrible for the environment.
Yeah, that's why I got it.
They're one of the worst polluters 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 exhaustiums.
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 yes, I bought a lawnmower just to do the little patch out in front of our buildings. Now, poor Momo doesn't get long grass against her junk when she's pot of you.
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, uh boy, I mean we could do ten 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 Skycaptain in the World.
Of Tomorrow Yeah, or Sin City.
Yeah. I like both of those.
Yes, did you know sin City? Every single bit of the set was CGI.
Yeah, and that Skycaptain did it first yeah, year before huh yeah, every bit of that was. It was a green screen movie.
I never saw it. Was he 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. Yeah, 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 very unique story.
Have you ever seen This has nothing to do with anything, but have you seen the Changeling? George?
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.
Changed.
It is great, genuinely, it's a genuinely scary ghost story. Yeah, like it is wonderful.
Yeah, I missed Georgie Scott too.
Yeah, he's a good actor. And I don't remember who that the 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. Yeah, we're gonna get derailed like every five sets.
Okay, effects are divided, and this is by the grab story 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. Right. 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 like practical effects, that's things like like makeup and prosthetics, like ed uses. The example of Dave Lynch is the elephant man, like the prosthetic makeup that was used to turn John Hurt or John Hurd 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 as 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. Yeah, 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 they have these fire bars that it's like what you have under your grill basically, right, or like the hide those and then that's your fire. Sure, because that 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 ten 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 sake, sure that lived and breathed on fast motion? What else can you do there? You can? And we'll see this some 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 like motion pictures being created. Yeah, 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 nineties. Uh. Yeah, people refined it and got better at it, and techniques got more.
The same general crafts Yeah, were used very much so, which is why craft service is called craft service. Oh yeah, because of each department is their own craft.
Oh I didn't know.
They're there to serve them pizza.
Roles, yeah, man or whatever you can put on some weight and film and something. I'll tell you that for you can.
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 of raisin one a California raisin, one frame at a time, twenty four 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 eight 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 going to get a seasoned desist later from Lucasfilm after talking about this in.
The podcast Night and then we have post production effects, and that is I think that's what a lot of people think of as special effects these days, really, because that's all the CGI stuff that you will see is all happens in post production.
Okay, all right, yes these days I got youa like, almost all special effects happens in post these days, right.
Well, no, they still combined 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 in 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, like the basis of special effects was founded, like in the nineteenth century, 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. 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 tri career 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 ninety three, that's eighteen ninety three, yeah,
or eighteen ninety five. He made a short film called The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scott's, 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 want?
Did you see that one?
It's he uses a stop trick with Mary getting beheaded, and right when the axe is going to fall, you know, he switches her out for a dummy, then starts the camera back up and he chops the dummy's head off, and it's it looks pretty good, like you can't there's no big weird jump he did for eighteen ninety three. 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 Matt 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, just to make sure, like no dumb dumb pa bumps into it. Me.
So, Alfred Clark is credited with the first special effect, but a guy named George may lese did they get it? Meylee?
We should go ask Casey Pegram.
Oh, yeah, he would know.
I think it's uh Melie, Oh.
Nice, I think he just nailed it, George Mellie. At any rate, this guy is known as the father of special effects.
Yeah.
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, and 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 to 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 eighteen ninety six. 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 sitting.
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 kind of just stumbled upon this weird little substitution supplice that became part of filmmaking.
Yeah, because by the time the camera had started up again, the bus was replaced by a first So it looked like when he went back and watched it, bus suddenly transformed into a hearse and.
He said, wait till they get a load of bewitched seventy something years from now. So or no, I guess what was that in the fifties, sixties, sixties.
All right, So you may not recognize George Meliaise, oh I got at 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 twenty 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 is a very early movie. It was from nineteen oh two. But he was doing
all sorts of amazing stuff. He was using extensive costuming, masks, all sorts of in camera techniques.
His painting on film frames.
Yeah, and this is nineteen oh two, 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 Matt technique right after this.
I'm actually pretty psyched about this, all right, Chuck. As I said, I'm very psyched about the Matt.
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. 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 city scape 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 and 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 and Escape from New York. He was a matte painter.
Oh, I didn't know that.
That was like his first job.
It's Nate. Like, if you, 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, anytime you've seen a movie pre nineteen ninety three, maybe nineteen ninety 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, you know, bustling
or energetic or there. But 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 I for my money, matt painting is the single most important and widespread special effect ever.
Maybe hard to argue that, thank you.
Like it was in Mary Poppins. When Mary Poppins is coming into the City of London floating, that's a matte painting. When Superman walks into the uh, where's the what's the name of the place where he's from, the Crystal Cave.
Where Fortress of Solitude?
Yeah, is that where he talks with with Marlon Brando his dad. Uh? Yeah, I think so, okay, that's a matte painting.
And I think the Fortress of Solitude are the remnants of Krypton. Okay, I'm boy Superman. People are so mad at me right now?
People still I thought everybody's on the marble train.
No, people love Superman the comics.
Oh okay, because I was gonna say, I mean, you've seen what they've done Superman lately, right and Batman?
Yeah? So, uh, 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, or maybe not more obvious, just bigger and more right, But here's the thing relying on that mat 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 matt painting was developed by Norman Don and that is when nowadays he'll use what's called the mat 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 want to 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 that act 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 then 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 slidetcha. So it's not like the camera the film is moving through on the wall, right because in the article here says and then you just stop it, and what happens if you do that is the bulb burns the Okay, So you can't just stop a prety projector.
You produced like a slide of him 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. Yep, pretty neat.
You just open your trench coat. There you go.
And the big innovator with the original negative matte painting was Norman Don and he really like really led the way.
But I mean again, most of the stuff that does this now is done by computers imposed. 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, yeah, it's just mind boggling that they managed to get it, you know to this point.
Yeah, Norman Don 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 populs.
There are some other stuff too. There's like rear projection in front projection, which is basically like projecting the background and moving background onto a screen behind the actors. Yeah, basically you know all those hokey driving scenes. Yeah, yeah, the person's great, the car is being rocked or whatever the road behind them, that's front of 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.
Yeah.
And if it looks old fashioned, this 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 a rear screen projection. So what happens here is you're sitting in a car, in a still car on the set, but they're not projecting anything behind you. What you've got is two people shaking the car at a frame. What do
they grips Oh yeah, usually a grip. But I've shaken cars and trains before. It's because I'm just a body on the set, like get in there and shake that thing. In fact, one job I was on there was a faked subway train and the hydraulics broke early on and they're like, bring out the PA's you're gonna shake this train for twelve hours.
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 that said that our movement of the train looked to rhythmic and not believable.
So anyway, this fruit of the Looms commercial is 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 like an obvious background trees or rode or whatever, but maybe there's headlights coming up behind you.
Is dark, yeah, but there are 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 shaken shimmy.
I'm gonna be so mad later on.
What was this called 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, yeah, 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 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 nineteen thirty thirteen thirty three, Ye Claude Rains 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 in bandages and sunglasses and I think he smoked a cigarette or whatever. But when he took the bandages off and he took his sunglasses and closed 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 in 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.
They suddenly had an ass gotten a arre 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, other than maybe the green less prevalent or less use 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.
Anyone who's ever done the weather on the newscast I can tell you.
That, Yeah, there have been. There are blooper reels of weather people disappearing when they wear like a green jacket or something.
Right, it looks like the weather's going on through their body. Same thing. So I want to say one more thing about optical printers, or another little bit about it. Sure, So, what you have is a projector projecting a film on to 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 three.
Okay, so you 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 Ohn, No, it's worse than that.
Was it false false positives? Do you remember that time where I was like I took a pretty simple thing and just completely walk the dog with it. Yeah, okay, well I'll just do 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 tough 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 with before optical printers, which is a projector in a camera working together.
That's right, Okay, 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 and 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 four, right, the New Hope. That's the first one, right right.
I'm not confirming or denying anything. I'm just gonna let that stand.
Episode four is the first Star Wars movie that ever came out.
Correct, The Star Wars A New Hope is the first episode okay, that I ever saw in a movie theater, because it's the.
First one that ever came out. Anyway, when they were making this, you know, is it a Star Destroyer, the big the big daddy ships. Okay, oh man, we're gonna get murdered. Everything. All of the ships and Star Wars were models, yes, fairly small models. Actually they were at the base, Okay, I think it was episode four, 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 controlled cameras so that the camera would go through the shot and 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 controlled 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, the tie Fighter, two.
The deuce is what the people in the no call it s the Uh.
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 Indoor was a ship even though it was a planet. Uh. There was the the forest Speeder, uh huh, the the pod Racer yeah, and.
Doctors as that's right, he's the final ship. Yeah. Uh.
Do you know many people. Boy, their calf muscles just popped right out of the back to their legs.
Olly Fry is like hyperventilating somewhere in the office, and she doesn't know why. So, as I said earlier, it's it's usually a combination of these different techniques to create one overall special effect using these different crafts. And a great example Jurassic Park in the in the scene with the veloscer raptors in the kitchen, a great, great sequence
when it was playing cat and mouse with those children. Yeah, 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 two of I don't know, but there's just no way.
It was groundbreaking. I remember being just gobsmacked in the movie theater. Yeah, when I first saw those dinosaurs walking across the screen.
And that was nineteen ninety three, I believe, for the first Jurassic Park, right, Jurassic Park A New Hope, the first one that came out. So, but that was five years after the first OSCAR had been awarded for special effects. As far as I know, really, I believe that The Abyss was the first one to win an OSCAR for special effects. Maybe or they're 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.
Okay, remember the water Sure still looks pretty good.
It looks amazing. Yeah, this is nineteen eighty seven we're talking about.
Wow was that when that came out?
Yeah? I was surprised to see that too, because that holds up. I thought it was. Yeah, it's a good movie.
Yeah, I really like that movie.
How do you not like Ed Harris? If you don't like what? Did you not like it? Hair? 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 seventies or sixties NASA guy.
Hey, I love Ed Harris. All right, let's take another break, okay, and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about Star Wars episode whatever right after this. Okay, we're back, and we should talk. We should mention the garbage, Matt, real quick, because that is a big deal. A lot of times you have wire work or you have 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. You got to get rid of those wires unless you're ed would you can't have fish in line.
No, you're supposed to not, but yes, Or if.
You're Charlie's thrown and mad Max Ferry, you got to get rid of that arm. Or if you're in Forrest 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 it. He was like a Kidney candy store and way over did the like. And now Forrest is in the White House and using archival footage and sticking Forest in it.
Yeah, that whole 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. Well, you get a new technique and they just hammer it.
The guy from Industrial LIGHTE 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 distra 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 and like just the most amazing stuff you can possibly think of being done just because we can do it. He put it really really well. I think it's an embarrassment of riches.
Yeah, you know, total like it.
Can be done, So it's being done, everybody's doing it. It's just you know, like and it makes it less amazing, not necessarily because it looks bad. It just keeps looking better and better every time. Like if you if you look at Charlie Stern's prosthetic arm or missing arm. Yeah, 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 now.
I have long predicted a return to practical effects, really, 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 backs out there and use stuff that ten fifteen years ago when we lost five hundred thousand dollars to set up a rig like that.
Yeah. And that's how some young 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, 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. 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, But we should mention Lon Cheney. Sure, one of the original superstars of film in the Silent era, the man with faces. He was. 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 nine hundred and ninety seven.
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. He also this, dude, the stuff he did. I mean, if you look back, he did King Kong, the nineteen thirty three King Kong. Yeah, and if you look back at this, you're like, this is this is cool. But if you research what was done to create this, you're just blown away by it.
Yeah. Again, many processes coming together to create that nineteen thirty three 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 Tyrannosaurs recks. But it took seven weeks the film. Yeah, because there's twenty four frames shot per second in a film, that's right, and 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 fifty five 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 fifties and sixties with movies like Jason and the Argonauts.
And Clash of the Titans. Yeah, I remember Medusa, Sure, Scary Lady.
Yeah, that had to be toward the end of his career, I guess because that was in the eighties.
Yeah, I think like eighty one maybe remember The Minute Tar two Man.
That was cool movie. That was a big movie for me as a kid.
Yeah, and I 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. And she created the very famous mask of the gill Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon in the mid nineteen fifties and was unceremoniously fired.
Not just fired, stricken from the credits.
Yeah, this guy named Bud Wesmore 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 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 gil Man for yeah, the creature from the.
And this has only come out in the last 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 due now though, which is good.
Yeah, that is very good.
There's Dick Smith was amazing. He created the squib Oh really, Yeah, he's a he's a very famous makeup artist. He's really good at making people look aged.
Yeah. He made forty seven year old Marlon Brando look much over five than the Godfather. Oh yeah, yeah he was only he was a year younger than me. Brando.
I never thought about it.
That nuts.
Wow, he really is good. He also did Death Becoms Her, which is one of the all time great movies.
Yeah, yeah for sure. And The Exorcist yep, and.
Scanners and have you ever seen Ghost Story from nineteen eighty one? Oh yeah, yeah, very scary movie. The old dudes he did, he did that.
What else? Very famously aged Dustin Hoffman a little big man by many many years.
Sure.
And then in the last like twenty five thirty 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 mentored a generation of special effects employees, employees, creators, artists.
Sure, all three of those Lord gig workers.
Rick Baker American Werewolf in London in nineteen eighty one, which still holds up. The thriller video in nineteen eighty three Star Wars, Moss Isley Cantina. He made all those.
Yeah, did you know that about the Moss Eisley Cantina. Sure, I didn't know that. He was almost single handily respondib Yeah, 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.
Stan Winston also did the makeup for what I think is maybe the best slash film of all time, Friday the Thirteenth Part two.
Yeah, two is when Jason comes along, right.
Yes, it's before he got his mask. He gets his mask in three. I think the Fria thirteenth 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, I think it's like watching him again as an adult. I'm like, these are really good.
Yeah.
Splisher films like even better than I remember for me and a kid. Yeah, And the reason stan Winston filled in for Friday the Thirteenth Part two is because the guy who did Friday thirteenth, the first one. Tom Savini was unavailable. He was off doing Creep Show, I believe. But Tom Savini's another legend.
I think they're redoing Creep Show, are they? Okay? I'd watched that different stories? Oh even better, I think, if 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 off the Rocker movie.
And then these days there are companies I and Wetta, ILM Industrial Light and Magic is Lucas's company, and they're cool because they invented this stuff because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done right, and he was like, 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 mo cap, 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. Yeah, at like joints and crucial places where the body moves and the actor stunt person or dance or whoever wearing the suit goes through the motions and.
Then they're just going through the motions.
Sure, and that those motions that 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 in The Last Crusade. Wrong, really, what is it going to be?
It's another Spielberg movie. Okay, it's young Sherlock Holmes. Well you remember the Stained Glass Night that comes to life and tries to slash one of them with his sword. 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 nineteen eighty five.
Well, it says maybe there's 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 Writers of the Lost Arc, isn't it?
Oh No, you're right, You're right lastad okay, Yeah, says here. It was the first ever digital composite of a full screen live action image.
There's something in the language there.
Yeah, because 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 is the first moving CGI image. Is 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.
Uh huh, Kroll Runaway. It's Tom Selleck yeah.
And Gene Simmons.
Yeah, in the bad Guy's right. That's all Kroll a lot too. Oh yeah. Looker had Albert Finnie, right, if I remember correctly.
Albert Finnie and Susan Day.
Yeah. Susan Day Yeah.
Written by Michael Crichton.
I think that was the first full body three D 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 where you would see a computer screen in like Westworld or Aliens or Star Wars, and they're like, what is the computer going to look like? You know? Not now that that was the first time they used computer generated imaging was to yeah, 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 nineteen eighty two. But there's a genesis like Earth being you know, like cooling and turning into the Earth, and there's this amazing shots around it. That's all CGI. And that was the first one, and Tron I thought for sure Tron would have been among the first. Apparently most
of that was animated by humans, not computers. That's right, The 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 is the aging technique that they're getting better and better?
Yeah, they really are.
Yeah. So the new Scorsese pick the Irishman I think d ages and it has taken a long time to get out because it's the d aging didn't look good enough for Scorsez, so they have d aged de Naro. And then I saw this new Angle movie Jemini Man, where Will Smith of now he plays an assassin and he has to go kill his younger self Looper. Uh yeah,
sort of like Looper, I guess. But this Gemini Man script has been in development for like twenty five years with various people attached, but they could never do.
It because of the technology.
Yeah, huh, 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 the aging looks great. They didn't d age him. It is a fully CGI Will Smith. Oh, and it looks that really the younger version is yeah.
Wow.
So I was like, man, they're getting so good at the d that's amazing. So he mowcapped his whole performance motion captured and they just used fresh Prince photos.
And they just basically deep faked them sort of Prince.
Have you seen the Bill Hayder deep fake that's going around now. It's pretty cool. Yeah, because he goes from Hater to Tom Cruise to seth Rogan back to Tom Cruise. It's like kind of all over the place.
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 it's cheaper to put a plate of food in the background digitally than cook the food and put it on set, right, which is that's a bad example. Or you can color grate a movie you completely change, like the movie Oh 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.
And they used to have to like film it at some weird exposure and then project it at another exposure to some filter and then the optical the negative. Yeah, now they can just do it all with a computer, easy peasy.
It's great. 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, I hadn't seen that movie. It's been twenty years since it came out.
You've never seen The Matrix.
No, I hadn't seen it in a long time. Gotcha, But I didn't realize this is the twenty year anniversary. Watched it last night. Still totally holds up, really looks great. Fun. Yeah, well acted by most of the cast members who didn't act well. Oh, you know Ken. It 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 and it'd be too just too serious. I think, like, imagine Tom Cruise in that in the major 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, I think.
So do you see those John Wick movies.
I've seen some of it. It's just like a little too video gamy for me. Yeah, but I mean it's fine. I respect that people like it.
Sure, here we go. Okay, it's about three D. Three D. It's about solar panels. I got movies on the three D. You got the well they are in three D. I guess oat, 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 pains.
Oh that's a good point.
A new residential shingle roof should last about thirty years, but at the roof isn't nearly new. I would not suggest installing solar paanpeanels.
And definitely don't install it if 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 fifty to seventy five percent or more to the cost of the reroofing due to the added labor costs to remove and reinstall the panels. Yeah, don't you 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. So I talk to add solar panels on an old roof and are now paying through the nose for repairs or replacement. Reputable 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 reroofing costs 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. I want to have a new stuff you should know and that is from Owen Sinsinig.
Great name, first day and last yep, love the name Owen, Stephen King's kids name.
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 and 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. You can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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