Today, movie effects are mostly done in CGI, especially if they’re of the death-defying type. [Tyler Bell] shows us how they shot actors with arrows before CGI.

Almost every medieval movie has someone getting shot with an arrow, but how do you do that non-destructively? [Bell] shows us two primary methods that were used, the pop up rig and steel pronged arrows. The pop up rig is a spring loaded device with one end of an arrow attached that pops up when a mechanism is triggered. [Bell] 3D printed his own version of the mechanism and shows us how it can be used to great effect on shots from the side or rear of the victim.

But what about straight on shots where the rig would be blatantly obvious? That’s when you get to actually shoot the actor (or their stunt double anyway). To do this safely, actors would wear wooden body armor under their costumes and arrows with two small prongs would be shot along a wire into the desired impact site. We appreciate [Bell] using a mannequin for testing before letting his brother shoot him with an arrow. That’s definitely the next level above a trust fall.

We even get a look at using air cannons to launch arrow storms at the end which is particularly epic. Looking for more movie magic? How about the effects from King Kong or Flight of the Navigator?

Thanks to [Xerxes3rd] on Discord for the tip!

Battlelines are being drawn in Canada over the lowly Flipper Zero, a device seen by some as an existential threat to motor vehicle owners across the Great White North. The story started a month or so ago, when someone in the government floated the idea of banning devices that could be “used to steal vehicles by copying the wireless signals for remote keyless entry.” The Flipper Zero was singled out as an example of such a nefarious device, even though relatively few vehicles on the road today can be boosted using the simple replay attack that a Flipper is capable of, and the ones that are vulnerable to this attack aren’t all that desirable — apologies to the 1993 Camry, of course. With that threat hanging in the air, the folks over at Flipper Devices started a Change.org petition to educate people about the misperceptions surrounding the Flipper Zero’s capabilities, and to urge the Canadian government to reconsider their position on devices intended to explore the RF spectrum. That last bit is important, since transmit-capable SDR devices like the HackRF could fall afoul of a broad interpretation of the proposed ban; heck, even a receive-only SDR dongle might be construed as a restricted device. We’re generally not much for petitions, but this case might represent an exception. “First they came for the Flipper Zero, but I did nothing because I don’t have a Flipper Zero…”

Don’t you just hate it when the only way to get data from a device on your network is via the vendor’s cloud? We sure do, and so does Scott, a chap from Australia who went to amazing lengths to intercept data from his solar power system. It’s a long, drawn-out saga that appears to have lasted many months before he finally figured out how to set up what’s essentially a man-in-the-middle attack that lets him see data from his system before it gets shipped off to the vendor’s site. The great thing about his write-up is that he documents all the dead ends he encountered before hitting on the final answer. What impressed us most was the way that many of these side-quests yielded some kind of actionable information, even if it was just to give him a sense of what the developers were thinking of when they built the encryption for the IoT part of this. Spoiler alert: they weren’t very good at it. We just love stories about such reverse-engineering heroics; tip of the hat to Hash over at RECESSIM for featuring this story on his latest “Reverse Engineering News” segment.

Given their eye-watering budgets, you’d be forgiven the thought that every effect seen in Hollywood movies is accomplished with some kind of bespoke device that costs a ton of money. But sometimes it’s the simple hacks that get a production brought in on time and budget. A great example is this cordless drill camera shaker, which was spotted in a recent production about Formula E racing. The drill, which appears to be wearing Bosch livery, has an eccentric wooden disc chucked up in it. The drill rests up against the side of an Arri Super 35 cine camera and when the trigger is pressed, the wobbling disc recreates the vibration a race car driver endures. Ironically enough, the camera appears to be mounted on a Steadicam, a camera stabilizer intended to make smooth shots.

SMD assembly is easy, right? Just take your PCB, arrange all the extra boards into a jig, tape down your stencil, and smear the solder paste out with whatever squeegee-like tool you can find. But what (sometimes) works at home doesn’t always scale well, as evidenced by this “Everything you ever wanted to know about stencil printing but were afraid to ask” guide. It’s a PDF of a slide deck by Chrys Shea, who really gets down into the weeds on stencil printing. There are a ton of fascinating technical details that we had no idea about, like the degree to which the area ratio (the ratio of the stencil thickness to the area of a given aperture) affects the transfer efficiency, or how much solder paste gets stuck to the pad versus how much sticks to the stencil walls. There’s also stuff in there about nanocoating stencil walls, the properties of solder paste — turns out it’s a non-Newtonian fluid — the effects of board support on gasketing, and that “squircles” are better than squares. We’d love to have seen the presentation live, but the slide deck is still really useful. As is “The Analog,” which is where we found this gem — if you aren’t subscribed to it, you really should.

And finally, can you cook a hot dog using an AM radio tower? For certain values of cooking, yes. If this sounds to you like shenanigans the Geerling boys would be up to, you’re right, with the senior Geerling, a radio engineer, doing the actual cooking, and his son Jeff serving as sous chef. The hot dog was impaled on some grounded wire tines on the end of an insulated stick and held near an operating AM radio tower. That didn’t do much, but the show started once the hapless frank was pushed into contact with the tower. The raw power quickly vaporized the meat, while simultaneously acting as a receiver for the signal. If you ever thought touching a live radio tower would be a good idea, it’s not. Just ask the hot dog.

Today, it’s easy to take realistic visual effects in film and TV for granted. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has all but done away with the traditional camera tricks and miniatures used in decades past, and has become so commonplace in modern productions that there’s a good chance you’ve watched scenes without even realizing they were created partially, or sometimes even entirely, using digital tools.

But things were quite different when King Kong was released in 1933. In her recently released short documentary King Kong: The Practical Effects Wonder, Katie Keenan explains some the groundbreaking techniques used in the legendary film. At a time when audiences were only just becoming accustomed to experiencing sound in theaters, King Kong employed stop-motion animation, matte painting, rear projection, and even primitive robotics to bring the titular character to life in a realistic way.

Getting Physical

As you might expect, the stop-motion puppets used in King Kong were all relatively small: ranging from a tiny figure used for the scenes where Kong was climbing the Empire State Building, to a two foot (0.6 meter) version used when the monster was at street level.

These puppets were built with an internal metal structure, known as an armature, that used ball joints to achieve a high level of articulation. There was even a diaphragm in the chest that could be moved to make it look like Kong was actually breathing. The armature was then covered with cotton to add bulk, which could be formed into visibly defined “muscles” with the strategic application of string. A final layer of real rabbit fur helped give Kong a more lifelike appearance.

Katie mentions that the soft fur did pose a problem: you could clearly see the indents left by the animator’s fingers when they manipulated the puppets between frames. But as luck would have it, audiences interpreted what was essentially a production error as the beast’s fur rippling and standing on end, which actually added to the overall realism.

Full-scale versions of Kong’s hand, foot, and upper torso were also created. The hand and torso specifically were mechanized so they could portray rudimentary movement in the same scene as the actors, such as when Kong pulls Anne out of the apartment building through the window.

Perfecting Projection

As Katie explains, King Kong visual effects supervisor Willis H. O’Brien had already pioneered the use of stop-motion to bring giant creatures to life in earlier works such as The Lost World in 1925. But what set this film apart was how it combined the technique with footage of human actors.

One of the ways this was accomplished was through rear projection — the completed stop-motion segments of Kong would be projected onto a translucent screen from behind the set. From the camera’s perspective the actors would appear in the foreground, and the stop-motion puppets, now enlarged many times their original size, would seem to be behind them.

This could be thought of as the analog version of today’s “green screen” techniques, but with the added bonus that the actors could see the projection and respond accordingly. In fact, in that regard it might actually be more accurate to compare it with the recently developed “LED wall” sets used in big-budget science fiction shows such as The Mandalorian and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

The technique could also be used in reverse — with a miniature projector and screen used to place footage of the actors into set with the puppets. By advancing the projector frame-by-frame in conjunction with the movement of the puppet, it would give the impression that Kong was interacting with the human actors.

A Lasting Legacy

A film using any one of these techniques would have been impressive to audiences in 1933. But the way O’Brien and his team managed to combine them, sometimes all within the same scene, redefined what the fledgling medium was capable of. Thanks in large part to their work, King Kong is still considered a seminal work in the field of visual effects nearly 100 years after its release — and is often listed among the greatest movies ever made.

Remember Terminator 2? Guns were nearly useless against the murderous T-1000, played by Robert Patrick. Bullets fired at the “liquid metal” robot resulted only in a chrome-looking bullet splash that momentarily staggered the killing machine. The effects were done by Stan Winston, who died in 2008, but a video and short blurb shared by the Stan Winston School of Character Arts revealed, to our surprise and delight, that the bullet impact effects were not CGI.

How was this accomplished? First of all, Winston and his team researched the correct “look” for the splash impacts by firing projectiles into mud and painstakingly working to duplicate the resulting shapes. These realistic-looking crater sculpts were then cast in some mixture of foam rubber, and given a chromed look by way of vacuum metallizing (also known as vacuum deposition) which is a way of depositing a thin layer of metal onto a surface. Vacuum deposition is similar to electroplating, but the process does not require the object being coated to have a conductive surface.

These foam rubber splash patterns — which look like metal but aren’t — were deployed using a simple mechanical system. A variety of splashes in different sizes get individually compressed into receptacles in a fiberglass chest plate. Covering each is a kind of trapdoor, each held closed by a single pin on a cable.

To trigger a bullet impact effect, a wireless remote control pulls a cable, which pulls its attached pin, and the compressed splash pattern blossoms forth in an instant, bursting through pre-scored fabric in the process. Sadly there are no photos of the device itself, but you can see it in action in the testing video shared by the Stan Winston School, embedded below.

When you’re done checking out the video, maybe take a peek at this fan’s effort to create a T-800’s arm.

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[Captain Disillusion] has earned a reputation on YouTube for debunking hoaxes and spreading a healthy sense of skepticism while having some of the highest production value on the platform and pretending to be some kind of inter-dimensional superhero. You’ve likely seen him give a careful explanation of how some viral video was faked alongside a generous dose of sarcastic humor and his own impressive visual effects. VFXcool is a series on his channel that takes deep dives into movies that are historically significant in the effects industry. For this installment, [Captain Disillusion]’s “intern”, [Alan], takes over to breakdown how filmmakers brought a futuristic spaceship to life in 1986’s Flight of the Navigator.

Making a movie requires hacks upon hacks, and that goes double in the era when the technology and techniques we now take for granted were being developed even as they were being put to film. The range of topics covered here is extreme: from full-scale props to models; from robotic motion control rigs to stop motion animation; from early computer graphics to the convoluted optical compositing that was necessary before digital workflows were possible. The tools themselves may be outdated, but understanding the history and the processes allows for a deeper insight into how we accomplish these kinds of effects today. And, really, it’s just so… cool.

[Captain Disillusion]’s previous VFXcool is all about the Back to the Future trilogy, and it’s a little shorter with more information on motion control rigs. We also love seeing how people make DIY effects in their own homes. LEGO actually seems like a pretty popular option for putting together whole scenes in amateur filmmaking.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and by that logic a video must be worth millions. However, from nearly the dawn of photography around 1840, photographers have made fake photographs.  In modern times, Photoshop and Deepfake make you mistrust images and videos. [Action Lab] has a great camera trick in which it looks like he can control the speed of light. You can see the video below.

You probably can guess that he can’t really do it. But he has videos where a real laser beam appears to slowly move across the screen like a laser blaster shot in a movie. You might think you only need to slow down the video speed, but light is really fast, so you probably can’t practically pull that stunt.

The trick is to build a chopper that interrupts the light beam. The spacing of the aperture and the speed will control how the light appears. Of course, that doesn’t do anything unusual if you are just looking at the scene. The laser beam appears and then disappears as normal, seeming to travel instantly.

The trick is in how a digital camera takes a picture. The scan rate is fast, but the light is faster. So even though the laser traverses the frame all at once, the camera may only capture a piece of it. By controlling the scan rate and the rotation of the chopper, you can make different effects pretty easily. The video took inspiration from an earlier video that you might also enjoy.

Sure, you could add the laser shots digitally later. But the fact is, the laser bolts look real because — well — they are. In both videos, you can see people interacting with the beams and it makes it really clear that it isn’t a special effect or, if it is, it is a really good one.

If this inspires you to make your own sci-fi opus, we can suggest a few props. Maybe even throw in a bit of lightning.

Don’t get too excited now, we aren’t talking about that kind of dirty video. There’s plenty of other places on the Internet you can go to find that sort of thing. No, this video mixer is “dirty” because it combines two composite video streams into one garbled up mess that’s best viewed on an old CRT TV. Why, you may ask? Because rock and roll, that’s why.

Created by [Luke Blackford] as a visual for his band’s performances, the “Dirty Pi” is an exceptionally simple way to create some wild imagery with two Raspberry Pi Zeros. It might not be the most practical of devices, but if you want so throw some creepy looking video up on screens all over the house (say for an upcoming Halloween party), this is a fantastic way to do it on the cheap.

The idea is simple: connect the oft-forgotten composite video outputs of two Pi Zeros to a potentiometer, which then leads to the display. Play different videos on the Pis with the media player of your choice, and twiddle the potentiometer to create ghosting and interference. If you want to get that true 1980’s retro feel, put the whole thing into an old VHS cassette like [Luke] did, and you’re ready to rock.

Those who’ve been around the block a few times might recognize this trick as a variation of the [Karl Klomp] Dirty Video Mixer, and [Luke] tells us he likes this project because he was able to pull it off without writing any code or even doing any complex wiring, though he does imagine a future version where he adds some remote control functionality.

If you like your video mixers with more smarts and less dirt, we’ve covered a very slick build using the LM1881 in the past.

[via /r/raspberry_pi]