The+use+of+Special+Effects

Back to Heavenly Creatures:HEAVENLY CREATURES - YEAR 13 VISUAL TEXT = Special Effects  = The special effects were handled by WETA Limited, the most comprehensive special effects house in the southern hemisphere. The Borovnian sequences were supervised by Richard Taylor while the digital effects were supervised by George Port. Richard and his team constructed over seventy full-sized, latex costumes to represent the Borovnian crowds - plasticine figures that inhabit Pauline and Juliet's magical fantasy world. //Heavenly Creatures// contains over thirty shots that were digitally manipulated ranging from the morphing garden of the "Fourth World," to castles in fields, to the "Orson Welles" sequences. Peter Jackson is vitally interested in being at the forefront of technology. While not being, as he says, especially computer literate, he has sought out and bought (with others) the latest hardware and software so that he can use the most up-to- date computer-generated special effects. At WingNut Productions in Wellington, Jackson has installed the only complete system in the Southern Hemisphere for going (at maximum quality) from film to video, and back to film, having manipulated the video image on the computer. The film is transferred to video at a staggeringly slow three minutes per frame (that's 12 hours for a ten-second shot!) on an Oxberry Cinescan 6300. The frame is uniformly lit by a mass of fibre optics. The video image is sent to a Silicon Graphics computer running Renderman, Soft Image and Matador software. Here, George Port, who works with Jackson, does what manipulation is required- -be it matting in a different fragment of image, correcting a flaw (a television aerial in a period image), or morphing from a rock to a statue. Once finished, the video image is projected onto a cathode-ray tube and filmed (by a MGI Solitaire with an Oxberry movie back) at the much faster rate of three seconds a frame. Having gone so precisely from film and back again, it has little or no video 'look', except in some areas of retouching. That in itself is not necessarily a defect for the slight artificiality can be used to noticeable effect //The Age of Innocence//) or inconspicuously, as when fantastic edge blend imperceptibly with the fantasy of the film itself (as appears the case in //Heavenly Creatures//). Cinema Papers, April 1994, 97/8, pp. 20-30.   Ä   ** Make a list of scenes that utilise special effects. Note what type of effect has been used. **     Borovnian scenes – plasticine/clay figures shown full sized; Deborah morphs into Juliet; Diello slices a peasant in half;      Fourth World – NZ landscape morphs into a spectacular, colourful and lush garden;      the sand castle – we see inside it; use of miniatures etc   Ä   ** Discuss the use of special effects. What do they contribute to the success of the film? **     they bring alive the girls’ fantasy worlds      they show how attuned they were – Juliet is able to take Pauline into her own fantasy   the spectacular Fourth World highlights the drabness of reality, especially Pauline’s reality   show how the gap between fantasy and reality was closing   make concrete the violence of their imaginations – the deaths of Nicholas, the doctor, the vicar, Borovnian citizens – which give an insight into the way they see problems are to be solved   add humour – if black – such as when Rev Norris is executed NB ‘morphing’ = transforming one form into a different one (from Morpheus, Greek god who could change form; cf Morpheus in //The Matrix//) Jackson: "We were shooting in a house [Ilam] that was part of the real story in the 1950s, but in the meantime its large open balcony had been glassed in. There was no way the owner was going to let us rip the balcony out, so we shot a separate balcony that we built in a studio and matted the two together on the computer." Cinema Papers, April 1994, 97/8, pp. 20-30. 