cgi and Ray Harryhausen

After my blog post in October regarding the Ray Harryhausen BBC interview, I eventually went on to purchase the Ray Harryhausen DVD - 'Special Effects Titan'. I have watched the documentary a few  times now, and each time I watch it I realise how special and talented Ray Harryhausen was and the massive influence he has had on the film industry right up to today. It's overwhelming to think that one man can have SO much influence and inspire generations of film makers and pioneers of the film industry.

It was great to hear Harryhausen's opinion on special effects today and the use of CGI in films, and although he thought it was a great step forward for films, he said that he would still prefer to use 'real models' even today.

I agree that CGI has provided the film industry and audiences with a magical world and has allowed us to create the unimaginable and enhance the unbelievable, but I do believe that in some cases, the there is blatant overuse of CGI, and unfortunately this can be overbearing on the narrative and actors' performances. One movie that prompted me to write my dissertation about the overuse of CGI in movies, was Man of Steel, and while being a generally good movie and one that i enjoyed; i did sigh when the action sequences played out before me and I was watching a drool of CG fight sequences in double speed and the unimaginable over exaggerated destruction of buildings that, to be honest, was unnecessary and made me as a viewer, switch off.

Even though when we see movies like this, we know it isn't real...that is what we generally go to the cinema for, to escape reality. But we do want to be immersed into an alternate reality that could be imaginable, and when the filmmakers go over the top with CG it makes it truly unbelievable and somehow the emotional connection we have, or want to have as an audience, is somehow lost or broken and it becomes less believable, and less real.

Death Walks Trailer Number 2

Here is the Official Death Walks trailer number 2 that i put together.  Francesca Ciardi (Cannibal Holocaust, 1980)  and Jessie Williams (Tracey Beaker),  are two of the new additions to this trailer as well as Karis Pentecost.

If you watch to the end (hope you do) there are some text effects that I created in After Effects. The idea was from Prometheus trailer that the Director of Death Walks liked the look of. After a little research and testing out I managed to get a similar effect but instead of masking the text all the way through the trailer (as Prometheus had done), I had the effect last a short time at the end before the credits.

Here are some screen shots of my progress with the text:

This is the masking of each letter in sections, as you can see in the layers palette there were quite a lot of masks to reveal in the animation!

This image shows what the animation looks like as its playing through.

Below are some more progressional images of the animation