What are the film and television special effects?

Film and television special effects can be roughly divided into visual effects (visual effects) and sound effects (sound effects).

First, the visual effect:

1 Movie Age

Traditional special effects can be subdivided into makeup, scenery, fireworks special effects and early movie special effects.

Before the computer appeared, all special effects depended on traditional special effects. Everyone is familiar with the Journey to the West in 1980s, in which all monsters are made up of traditional special effects. Professionals make monster masks, and actors wear them on their heads to shoot. The scenery is reflected in the scene of the Heavenly Palace. Building some buildings similar to the Heavenly Palace and putting some smoke will create a foggy scene of the Heavenly Palace.

2.CG era

CG can be understood as computer creation. When traditional special effects can't meet the requirements of the film, CG special effects are needed, and CG special effects can achieve almost all the effects that human beings can imagine.

The production of special effects in CG era can be roughly divided into two categories: three-dimensional special effects and synthetic special effects. Three-dimensional special effects are completed by three-dimensional special effects artists, who are mainly responsible for the performance of dynamic animation, which are mainly classified into modeling, material, lighting, animation and rendering. The synthesis of special effects is completed by the synthesizer, who is mainly responsible for the synthesis of various effects. Main categories: keying, rubbing, color matching, composition, and scenery collection.

Companies representing the world's top level include: Industrial Light Magic/New Zealand Vita Company, etc. In the past twenty years, these companies have completed countless shocking blockbusters. Let's briefly introduce these two companies.

The Industrial Light Magic was founded by george lucas in 1975, and its masterpieces include Avatar, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminator, Jurassic Park and Star Wars. The most classic works are the prehistoric dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the octopus face of pirates of the Caribbean.

New drama Vita was founded by Peter Jackson, and its representative works include The Lord of the Rings series, Avatar (such special effects blockbusters are basically completed by several special effects companies) and King Kong. Gollum and King Kong basically represent the highest level CG creatures in the industry. Another very influential achievement is the development of the group animation tool MASSIVE, through which the epic melee of The Lord of the Rings was created. This software has been studied in China for several years, but limited by the cost and personnel level, the results rarely appear.

Second, the sound effect:

Sound effects, called sound effects, are usually accomplished by a sound imitator, a tape recorder and a mixer. The imitator is responsible for capturing all special sounds (such as explosions, footsteps, broken sounds, etc.). ) in the picture. The sound engineer is responsible for recording the imitator's voice, and finally editing and processing it into film and television sound effects.

Visual experience of film and television special effects

Truth is the basic principle of artistic creation. It is neither equal to life itself, nor can it be verified and restored like scientific truth. Movies make people dream, good movies make the audience unwilling to wake up, but no one wants to dream about their own people and scenery. Film and television special effects make this dream more exciting. Through special effects, the film creates a dream that the audience has never seen or thought about. As one of the means of film creation, the creation of film and television special effects also follows the basic law of artistic creation-authenticity.

1, humanistic scenery, vivid acousto-optic color

Human scenery and acousto-optic color are the most important elements of audio-visual language and the main components of picture information. The principle of dealing with these audio-visual elements in film and television special effects is to restore their overall relationship. Whether it is virtual generation or key generation, it is necessary to combine the ambient light conditions of the scene, unify the tone and color, restore the texture, and achieve a realistic effect. If this is not done well, the audience will realize what is the result of film and television special effects, thus creating a sense of alienation.

2. The viewpoint, movement and trajectory of the lens are reasonable.

The viewpoint of the lens is the viewpoint of the audience, and its reasonable position should follow the principle of true feelings. Its rationality is to expand people's visual habits to a certain extent. The movement of the lens also has its rules. The traditional camera action has very strict and mature norms, which cannot be broken in digital special effects. If the camera moves at will, the form will be divorced from the content. The trajectory of objects has long been formed in nature, and only by strictly restoring the special effects of film and television can we experience the truth. A slight deviation will immediately change the overall relationship of people's understanding of things and produce unreality.

Detailed explanation of contemporary CG special effects

1 3 d special effects. Most of the characters and scenes with three-dimensional perspective changes are created by three-dimensional special effects. Three-dimensional special effects are almost the most difficult part of the whole special effects and the most problem-solving part. For example, various lifelike monsters in the film, the 20 12 flood that flooded the whole city, and the collapse of skyscrapers. The general production process is: model-material lighting-binding-animation-rendering.

Specific software: MAYA platform is the main platform in China, supplemented by dozens of softwares such as MAX, realflow, Houdini, C4D, XSI and Lightwave.

2 Synthetic special effects. The most common performance of composite special effects is that the heroes in costume films fly around the sky with flying skills. Specific implementation method: The actor fighting is shot separately from the sky, in which the actor fighting part is shot with the blue screen or green screen where the actor hangs the steel wire as the background, and then the blue screen and the steel wire are removed from the computer by using the later software, leaving only the actor part, and then pasted in front of the real shot sky. It looks like actors are fighting in the sky. Of course, the specific synthesis is much more complicated than this, and many later-stage software can also produce some three-dimensional special effects, but it is only an aid and is unlikely to replace three-dimensional software.

Commonly used software: nuke/fusion is the mainstream, and some companies use platforms such as AE/Combustion/Shake/Flame/Smoke.

Digital landscape painting and conceptual design. Digital landscape painting and conceptual design can be understood as painting.

Digital landscape painting: for example, a panoramic view of an ancient city appears in a film, involving thousands of ancient houses or palaces, flowers and trees, bridges and flowing water. If three-dimensional software is needed to make it, the cost will be high, and it usually needs the cooperation of many people to complete it, but with a digital painter, he can draw all these into a picture by himself.

Conceptual design: Conceptual design is usually used for pre-production reference. For example, there will be a monster in the film, but what does the monster look like? The director speaks in words, and the conceptual designer draws it in the form of pictures according to the director's requirements. After determining the image, he gave it to three-dimensional special effects to make lifelike monsters.

Function:

In the current film production process, the idea of special effects has been reflected from Storyboard, and the film and television special effects have changed the original traditional film production process and mode. In script planning and narrative arrangement, film and television special effects make the creator jump out of the traditional linear thinking mode and completely break the concept of time and space, so some pictures limited to shooting technology can be realized, and the creator can let go of his hands and feet and give full play to his imagination. In addition to traditional scripts and storyboards, film and television special effects also need their own special effects scripts.

In the early stage of shooting, in addition to field shooting, there are more and more scenes, blue screens, models, digital skylight paintings and other lenses. In order to meet the requirements of key making, actors are required to shoot in the blue screen studio, because there is no scene in the blue screen studio and it depends entirely on the imagination of the actors. It is also required that the emotional movements of the performance match the scenes in the composite picture, which is undoubtedly a challenge to the actor's experience and performance skills.

Moreover, the requirements for lighting and props are different from those of traditional shooting: the lighting staff should design the lighting in the studio in combination with the background light to be synthesized and the environmental changes including wind, rain and lightning, and some parts of the props will be hidden in the blue cloth, which also needs to be seamlessly combined with the props to be synthesized in production. The requirement for people who set up scenes and props is not only to make some physical models, but to draw the necessary scenes and props in the computer for later synthesis.

After the preliminary work is completed, the post-synthesis processing completely uses computer technology, and replaces the original traditional special effects methods such as masking and superposition with some functions of computer software.

The expression technique of film and television special effects

Film is an art of expression. Creators tell touching stories, express characters' feelings and infect the audience through audio-visual language. With the development of computer technology, film and television special effects have brought many themes that could not be expressed in the original film to the screen, and established a brand-new film language style and style. It provides the creator with unlimited imagination space, and the filmmaker's mind is liberated from the bondage of technology. Through film and television special effects, the director can create people, scenery and things that were not there originally, restore huge ancient buildings, and let modern people talk to historical figures. You can also adjust the camera's viewpoint and trajectory according to the needs of style and plot.

Digital special effects will be classified as the elements of audio-visual language together with human scenery, acousto-optic color and lens movement. As you can imagine, without digital special effects, there would be no Matrix, no narrative structure and philosophy of Matrix, and no image with static rotating perspective regarded as a model. Because the creators, the Wachowski brothers, began to tell stories and render pictures with the thinking of film and television special effects when writing scripts. They not only created many new shooting techniques, but also created picture language and narrative language that can only be realized through special effects.

6 industry status quo

In recent years, domestic CG special effects have made remarkable progress. Well-known ones are Hualong Company of China Film Group, BASEFX Company of the United States, and some branches of foreign special effects companies in China, such as Dortmund and Viewpoint Special Arts. But overall, the domestic CG special effects level is several grades worse than the above three. If Industrial Light Magic is a doctoral student, then the best company in China is the level of high school students or secondary school students.

Hong Kong special effects companies are represented by Wankuan and Centro Digital, and FATFACE is also good. His main works are Kung Fu by Stephen Chow/Fengyun Decision/Changjiang No.7/Metallic Attraction Kungfu Cyborg, etc. Between junior college students and undergraduates.

Movies with large domestic film investment and complex special effects, such as Tangshan earthquake and Chibi, are mainly handed over to special effects companies in Hong Kong or abroad. Except for a few companies such as Hualong, most domestic film and television special effects production companies rely on some relatively primary TV special effects and low-cost movies, which are characterized by low production costs and low requirements, and employees barely survive.

As nearly a thousand colleges and universities have opened animation and other related majors, there are hundreds of Maya training institutions in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and the junior talents have far exceeded the market demand. The average animation employment rate of animation graduates is estimated to be less than 30%, and the salary of newly employed students is mostly around 800-3000 (Beishangguang). Countless students have spent high tuition and training fees, but they can't stand in the industry; Universities and most training institutions spare no effort to advocate the gap between CG industry and film and television special effects industry150,000 for their own interests.

The domestic film industry, from investors, producers to directors, is still in a very slow development stage, although people have already seen the influence of American films. Today, when we have the ability of film and television production, the public and the media have shown great interest, but this interest is not aimed at the whole industry, but at the film and television special effects in American movies, taking into account the attention of the domestic film and television special effects industry. Apart from the employees themselves, there are not many people who care about film and television special effects.

In this environment, there are basically three situations in the application of film and television special effects: (1) The director is interested in film and television special effects and wants to make some attempts. However, the scale of the attempt is very small, not in the whole process of film production, so it can not achieve very profound results. (2) Make full use of film and television special effects in films that do not consider returns. Such as: Flying Leopard and Rough Waves. (3) Film creators hope that special effects can add some highlights and selling points to the film. In Critical Strike, some shots that are difficult or impossible to achieve are done with the help of computer.

In short, film and television special effects have not yet formed a very standardized commercial operation. There are few films with practical film and television special effects for commercial purposes, so the film and television special effects production industry has not been formed. The plight of the lack of professionals also plagues this immature industry. Few people engaged in film and television special effects production are from the film industry, but most of them are computer majors and art majors. I don't have enough understanding of moving images and my ability to tell stories in audio-visual language is not strong. However, with the progress of the times, the essence and function of film and television special effects are gradually recognized and utilized by China filmmakers.