Ultra Cheap Movie Tricks and Practical Effects

this science fiction set was made using one of the oldest tricks in the book and it's very effective this shot of a jet was done in a tiny living room guess who this is and what you're not seeing in the shot or where this was shot or how this ufo was faked all without computers cgi or green screen today we have all kinds of behind the scenes tricks from the 80s and 90s one of my favorites is miniature models here's one i made of washington dc because it's illegal to fly over washington there was even airplanes in the air and space museum i made the entire city in miniature in less than two weeks but it turned out pretty good this was back in the mid 80s but we did use the motion control system so we got some nice smooth motion shots another cool thing about miniatures is you can light them up all kinds of different ways you can get a nice magical feel it just has a certain look that cgi doesn't and here's the city of memphis in miniature that water is rippled shower door plexiglas this was built nine days that was for a news station i think i slept for three days straight after doing this you have to be kind of sadistic to do this kind of stuff and here's a local news station miniature here i am doing glass paintings i mentioned this in the last video yes i had short hair beard and glasses okay moving ahead a few years these are just photographs i stuck on glass of this thing here that i built out of foam core i call it a jet runner it's a jet speeder with legs it's actually quite sturdy you can sit on it and i put it in front of a big sky background i created in my backyard the lighting was all with mirrors reflecting sunlight hey the sun is free light and it's powerful so the whole thing was suspended in the air with ropes and the hydraulic legs were actually manipulated with fishing line we had a smoke machine going so yeah this thing was built actual size here's some of the shots from the final sorry about the video quality this old vhs tape that's all i have that's another glass painting we're in death valley with this one here for the cockpit he's just sitting on the carpet and i put some electronic gear around him and he's pretending to click buttons that aren't there okay so now he's flying in the air and he's doing loops notice the background is turning well guess what that is that's just a background painting on a nine foot disc that's being turned on a screw by hand and then when you hand hold the camera and shake it all up it actually looks pretty good he's just sitting in my living room on the floor and i have another person holding another jet behind him that's just a motorcycle helmet with a filter mask strapped over it a pool cleaning hose and a power cord now this one turned out pretty good this is what's called a multi-plane they're sitting still the background sky behind them is not moving there's two cutouts of landscape and mountains that are being moved on sliding door tracks on different speeds one's a little slower one's a little faster this is an old animation technique called a multi-plane effect this is just a pvc pipe and this is just a speed light camera flash that i just stuck there and here i am painting a background sky for a pov shot which is actually just a bunch of dirt and the camera is hanging on a sliding door track that's being pushed just over the surface of the dirt made to look like you're way up in the air looking down at a desert for an airplane's point of view background's clean it is fairly heavy eric everything else is good marcus is uh pretty right on he gets really excited when things are recognized this guy he was on american gladiators his name is danny lee clark and he went by the name of nitro this was a trailer i was making for a movie idea i had and people just pitched in because we all like to just have fun making movies everybody wants to be a part of something really cool and it's not that hard to get people to pitch in to make stuff like this i'm going to tell you how i did some of these shots in a second and guess who this is remember prince's friend vanity well this is her sister patricia matthews she looks just like her she had a really good look she didn't know who he were i'm surprised how she went along with everything including the explosions and everything all right i'm going to freeze this for a second you probably didn't even notice this see that weapon she's holding that's a light stand and that guy behind her that's a tripod set to three different lengths it's amazing how the mind sees what it wants to see it's all in context and that's one of the tricks of filmmaking you don't have to make everything in full detail here's an epic shot running through the jungle everybody's carrying tripods and light stands oh it's so funny what you can get away with oh my god now this one here here he is a guy crash landed in the jungle he's trying to figure out where he's at shot looks great right okay well this is another guess where this is it's my apartment complex he's just walking down the walkway here we smoked it up here you can see the wall on the left here for a moment i just smoked everything up motorcycle helmet here's a fake plant and a pool cleaning hose i love blowing stuff up this is a miniature i built i used black powder and mixed it with iron dust which creates the sparkles and then i use the estes rocket igniter now don't go running and try this it's something i did in my younger crazier years now this science fiction set get this it's my one bedroom studio apartment and this is all just foam core see when you go down the hallway is the shadow going to show in the mirror these things here stuck on the wall those are paint mixing trays from home depot all the white tubing i just got a roll of white photography background paper and made all these tubes out of it but the thing that makes this set look so good is the never-ending hallway you look about both directions and it just goes on forever and the way i did that yes i get this well my bedroom closet had sliding doors that had mirrors on them so i took them off the tracks and i put one on each end of the set facing each other the set was only 12 feet long but the mirrors kept them going forever and it turned out pretty darn good again this is a one bedroom studio apartment everybody else living in that complex had no clue what was going on in our room we had all these people in there this was a saturday morning and we're just we're shooting a movie in there and nobody knows it was just so cool and notice the beard and glasses are gone now i went completely the other way now i've got long bleached heavy metal hair what can i say it was the late 80s early 90s at least it was better than the beard and glasses okay then i was on a show called encounters where i was hired to show how easy it is to fake a ufo shot i had this little cut out of a building i think that was just a photograph by the way that jurassic park pinball machine in the background sega pinball gave me that because i did the artwork on that game but that's a whole other story anyway so here i am sticking a little piece of tape on a piece of glass and then that glass is held behind the photo cutout of the building then we reflected some light on that piece of tape to make it glow put the person in place is called a foreground miniature and we just moved the glass and it looks like the thing is moving it was so simple it's so easy to do with cgi and computers nowadays but this was 30 years ago and i was showing how easy it is to fake stuff like this all right here's me designing and building a music video set for steve stevens he was billy idol's guitarist for songs like eyes without a face you know that famous guitar pit well that's him alright and then in 1994 i started writing a script for a fantasy film called to the ends of time all saved on a little floppy disk remember those was it like one megabyte or something anyway then i got on a show called front runners welcome back to front runners everybody now our next subject was a pretty precocious child he was painting before he could walk and he made his own movies by age seven but what he's trying to do now is a good deal more ambitious he's trying to buck the hollywood system most of us just dream our dreams marcus rothbrance is living his marcus is an artist a visual effects wizard and a filmmaker who has recently turned his talents from the glitz of hollywood to the simplicity of his own living room i want to use this art form and makes people feel passionate and again and cry and feel good and go out into the world and do something with that inspiration now notice where i'm sitting here guess where that is that is an even smaller studio apartment the whole thing was like 600 square feet or something this is the living room this is where i was sitting the stone archway was just corrugated cardboard the rocky roof that looks like the inside of a cave is actually crumpled up gray photographic background paper like a nine foot roll that's been crumpled up and then i use push pins to just stick it into the ceiling that lion head on the wall that's just a foam core sculpture i did then some fake plants and some fabric and i painted a moon and a sky on the wall that's really all this is so that was my living room my studio apartment and this is the inside of the front door this is just cardboard painted to look like wood with more crumpled paper and fabric and this is my bedroom again it's just fabric and then up here this is just corrugated cardboard painted to look like wood it was a big fire trap but it looked really cool all right here's a sample of a miniature i did for a tv commercial i made the miniature and painted the background sky here's a miniature subdivision for a courtney love video i had to build this in three days and didn't have a lot of time check this out those pool umbrellas look at them they're little paper cocktail umbrellas in the video they drop a wrecking ball on the miniature i didn't care i got paid really good all right here's a house built into an iceberg for another music video i don't remember who it was for that was kind of cool and here i am starting to do matte paintings for my movie i use mainly acrylic paint and some airbrushing there's another miniature and this is a miniature not very small but it's a 30 foot miniature ship all made out of foam core it took me about a week to build the whole purpose was to blow it up which was really cool anyway so then i started my movie here i am painting the poster for it all right for the atomic city tv series concept i wanted to build a real jet car that he drove around in so we got an old used 85 corvette for like five thousand dollars we took the body off and then created our own fantasy card shape on the chassis it was just foam it wasn't perfect but it was good enough to get the concept across for the show i had a shot where i needed to strap the camera to the hood of the car and uh yeah folks this is as high tech as it gets it's not even duct tape that's masking tape and we drove the car around the streets of las vegas and i'm amazed it actually held but we got the shot and uh yeah masking tape i don't live on the edge i dance on it so anyway i'm just sharing stuff for people that love filmmaking because i love it it's a lot of fun it's great working with friends and talented people and it's just so much fun to create stuff and hopefully i'm sparking some ideas to help you do things cheaply if you don't have a lot of money all you need is creativity and inspiration i hope i sparked something see you next week [Music] you

Channel: MarkusPix

Views: 848,602

Keywords: special effects, behind the scenes, practical effects, practical effects vs cgi, visual effects, low budget filmmaking, filmmaking tips, film effects, forced perspective, movie effects, short film, movie effects before and after, special effects in movies, special effects video, filmmaking tips and tricks, multiplane, foreground miniature, glass rfx, special fx, movie fx, video fx, hollywood fx, visual fx, camera tricks, practical effects diy, practical effects in movies

Id: AE_5QyBykgg

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022