Advent Calendar: Day 20

By Circe -
Much like the magic example, special effects are a billion times cooler when you know how they're achieved. I've had an interest in them for as long as I can remember -- they're in that class of things that can pretend to be other things convincingly if you're clever about how you use them. You know, like how YouTube spent fifteen years using Macromedia Flash for the exact thing Flash was developed to not do.

Whether older or newer SFX are more interesting is a toss-up. I admit to having a soft spot for hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, but practicals blur the line between optical illusion and engineered stage magic. The public library where I grew up had a giant coffee table book of matte paintings by Ralph McQuarrie that I coveted endlessly. But digital effects use a lot of surprisingly similar techniques to old optical compositing methods, just executed with a workstation and a tablet.

The feller below, Captain Disillusion, could be classified as a late-generation skeptic. He spends a lot of his time explaining how various prank/viral/outright scam videos were created. He also uses a lot of FX work in his own presentation, and makes it abundantly clear that he has no problem with filmmakers fooling the audience -- it's just unethical to do it to an audience who doesn't know you're tricking them. The best part of his breakdowns of viral videos is that it shows just how much can be achieved by a solitary yahoo with a camcorder and a copy of Premiere that *kof* fell off the back of a truck.

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