Comments on: How to Shoot Actors with Arrows Sans CGI

By: m1ke

m1ke — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 07:01:12 +0000

I used to love watching TV shows like Movie Magic and anything that showed how special effects were done when I was a kid. Great video!

By: chris watts

chris watts — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 19:23:31 +0000

I was the VFX supervisor on the first ‘300’ movie, and just about all the arrwos were CGI. The spears were another story, as (generally) a spear is held by one human and and must convincingly impact another. This is complicated by the fact that a spear will indent clothing or skin when it hits. The special effects department had made telescopic spears so the attacker could keep pushing and the spear would puck into the he so as not to actually kill the other actor. This kinda worked, but the strength of the prop was severely compromised by the small area of overlap between the two parts of the spear. Visually this needed to be small to leave penty of room for the pointy end to disappear into the handle.

In a bit of cooperation betweer VFX and SFX, i came up with the idea to make a spear with much more travel by allowing the butt-end of the sliding part to actually pop out the back of the sleeve. The advantage was that this would increase travel and max penetration, the compromise was that someone would have to paint out the butt-end of the spear( if you even noticed the trick) . Since people are generally watching the business end of a pointy spear,any shortcomings of the paint-out would be less of a deal. It worked pretty well.

This didn’t solve our blood problem- liquid blood is a huge pain- you as soon as you start using it, youre looking at costume changes after ever take, and wardrobe departments are not generally funded to have dozens of outfits for every actor. And you risk embarrassing continuity errors whenever you use actual liquid blood. So the burden fel on VFX to make it work. We ended up shooting stills of ink blots splashed on paper and tnen digitally manipulating them in post in order to keep shooting moving and save the sets and wardrobe from blood spatters. There’s a cool compilation that someone made with a couple seqments about these and other VFX issues here : https://youtu.be/v–r6XKICks?si=IFE3Sahq8XbdR6cV

csw

By: NFM

NFM — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:52:28 +0000

In reply to Will Belden. I guess the author doesn't get to the cloud district very often.

By: Hirudinea

Hirudinea — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:51:22 +0000

The arrow with prongs on a monofilament gives me an idea, taser bow.

By: H

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:50:25 +0000

In reply to cplamb. Battle of Agincourt without clouds of arrows? I'm sure the French would approve.

By: Will Belden

Will Belden — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:40:26 +0000

I feel like this posting missed the opportunity for Skyrim’s “took an arrow to the knee” reference.

By: cplamb

cplamb — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:27:13 +0000

Here’s an interesting story. Someone set out to convert a Technicolor scene of the Battle of Agincourt to modern color film. When it was shot Technicolor used a four-strip process. One strip each for cyan, magenta, and yellow. They also added a fourth strip with black outlines because the Technicolor color printing process at that time did not produce very sharp color edges. In conversion they didn’t use the black strip because modern color film did not have this problem. When they didn’t know was they the EFX folks had used the black strip for the clouds of airborne arrows. The surprise result was the Battle of Agincourt without the clouds of arrows. Ooooops!