They have gone from stories of sinking ships and flaming buildings to all out spectacles that feature nature’s wrath, asteroid collisions and alien invasions. Since the 70s, Hollywood studios have fiercely battled at the box-office to produce the largest and most thrilling disaster movie ever created. Join us at http://www.WatchMojo.com as we take a look at the evolution of the disaster genre. We will illustrate the increasing scale of the on-screen devastation and the role that actors and special effects have played in these multi-million dollar productions, which aim to thrill us by depicting the end of the world in stunning high definition.
This is pretty cool. For Where The Wild Things Are Spike Jonze used a combination of real life-sized puppets with CGI faces that allowed them to show emotions, etc. Read more from Wired.com on how it was accomplished:
Building a lifelike monster is hard enough. But director Spike Jonze needed 14 of them, each with its own unique look and personality, for his film version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved Where the Wild Things Are. “When I read the book as a kid, I wanted to hug them, and I was scared of them at the same time,” Jonze says. To create fearsome physicality with approachable cuddliness, Jonze turned to the Muppet-masters at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, then used CG to make the beasts talk and emote. Sound complicated? That’s probably why the movie took half a decade to make. Here’s a look at the mechanics.
Heads: The heads were heavy and all-encompassing—performers could see, barely, through the creatures’ mouths. To make up for the lack of visibility, a small wireless video monitor mounted just above the performer’s eye level showed the view from Jonze’s camera. Head-mounted speakers played back the scripted dialogue.
Bodies: Some characters (like the horned Carol) had arms that were short enough for the puppet fingers to be slaved to simple tube controllers wrapped around the actor’s hands. Longer-armed monsters had mechanical hands made of a lightweight polymer called Plastazote, covered with carbon fiber for strength. Performers wore a backpack that supported a sort of rib cage and pelvis, over which hung a Lycra and foam “muscle suit” and a flexible fur skin made of custom four-way stretch fabric. “The suits had to be very lightweight, so as not to inhibit the characters, but they also had to look real,” says Peter Brooke, creative supervisor at the Creature Shop. That said, the Carol suit is 9 feet tall and weighs about 60 pounds.
Faces: “Initially I was thinking we would do animatronics in the faces,” Jonze says. “But then David Fincher,” who directed the facial-f/x-heavy Curious Case of Benjamin Button, “told me that was the stupidest thing we could ever do—go hours into the wilderness with a bunch of suits and all these servo motors and remote controls. We were working out of his office in Hollywood and he would leave notes on our door with a little drawing of a wild thing and an arrow that said ’suit’ and another arrow pointing at the face that said ‘CG.’” Heeding Fincher’s advice, animators created CG models of the creatures’ faces in postproduction and tracked them over what Jonze had shot on location. Using videos of the voice actors and of Jonze himself performing every scene, the animators added expressions. One tricky part was calibrating nonhuman mouth movements: Carol has a Kermit the Frog-like line that all but bisects his face; large movements would look cartoony and small movements would be too Muppety. (Turns out there is a such a thing!)
Wow, this might be the disaster flick to end all disaster flicks. And who else but Roland Emmerich to bring it to you ;) Check out the first full length trailer for the effects-jammed trailer:
Check out the Special FX Make-Up used in the My Own Worst Enemy webisode series! This one may not be for the squeamish!
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