Simple Special Effects?

hdurdle asks: "I'm helping a teacher friend with a project to demonstrate some simple TV and Movie special effects to some of his students (14-16 year olds). I've already recreated the lightsaber effect (every geek has done that before, right?) and I've tried the Goauld eyes from Stargate, so now we're looking for more inspiration. What SFX shots would Slashdot readers like to recreate given a few DV cameras, copies of Premiere and Photoshop and lots of time? I intend to write up any HOWTO information, and of course display the footage we shoot!"

Comments

Re:Simple StarTrek Fade

[Tomahawk]

I did something similar using Premiere - take a shot from a still camera of someone standing, then have them walk off the shot, and leave the camera rolling for a bit.

In premier, cut out the bit where they are walking away, leaving 2 films, and add one of the transition effects between the 2 films.

The person will then magically disappear using whatever effect you selected.

You can have the 'beam' back in the same way. Much easier than rotoscoping a lightsaber too.

T.

have you tried mixed color/bw

[kristjansson]

a la Pleasantville? It's simple on stills in any reasonably featured photo editor. probably a time consuming PITA on film, though, but the principle would still be the same.

Split video into frames, copy the frames, change mode to b/w, change mode back to color, add alpha channel, add layer, paste the original as the background layer, and 'erase' the areas on the upper (b/w) layer to show color, flatten image, export to frame. Lather, rinse, and repeat about 30 times for each second of video.

like I said, very time consuming by hand, but maybe there's a tool to automate it. In any case, there's a tutorial for doing this to a still on gimp.org, and I don't imagine it would be significantly different for video frames. YMMVG

3d ?

[i.r.id10t]

Why not take a stab at doing something 3d? I remember a web page a few years ago that told how to take 2 screen shots in Quake2, take the red out of one and the green out of the other (IIRC...), set some transparency, over lay them, and you end up with a stereoscopic 3d image - funky cardboard glasses required.

Speed / scale

[MarkusQ]

This may be more subtle than you're interested in, but it's one of the oldest special effect in the book: dimensioned values (speed, size, viscocity, acceleration, etc.) to not all scale together. By messing with them, you can make things appear larger/smaller/closer/stickier, etc. than they really are. It's most obvious in old model work where this wasn't done correctly--the minature dam bursts, and the water rushes out at full speed, rather than the proportionaly slower rate it "should" have, and the effect instantly looks fake.

For ideas, check out the second chapter of Drexler's Nanosystems, google for Reynolds Number, and look around...

--MarkusQ