Amazing Effects in Classic Films - How Did They Pull It Off? | Part 12

Giant alien creatures, a sinking ship, and an asteroid hitting Earth all on today's amazing effects, but can you guess how the effects were done before we tell you? As always, I'm going to show you a clip and you're going to have to try to figure out how they did the effect with what they had available to them at the time it was made. Yes, and then I kiss kiss. Let's play.

Yes. No, I don't like that. That feels weird. Wow. That feels weird. I don't like this. — That's like the equivalent of going to an all female nursing home. Just cheek pinchers. It kind of seems like she's on just like a platform that's lowering. Those are all just real hands and makeup. I mean, it seems like some of the hands are fake, but there's definitely real hands in there just in makeup just like I don't like it. — It feels like the set. She's just being pulled by her feet and then the camera's here and then the amount of hands, a few of those are practical gloves I bet with some hand puppets, but then the amount of hands just has to be some sheer robotic stuff. We showed some effects from Labyrinth on the last amazing effects episode, but this film is filled to the brim with practical ingenuity like the helping hands sequence. This effect might seem obvious at first glance, but the logistics were insane. To pull this off, the crew built a massive vertical 40-ft shaft. It wasn't a solid surface, it was a tiered structure covered in gray stretchy latex. This allowed the actress Jennifer Connelly to actually be lowered through the space on a harness passing through different levels of performers who were waiting behind the rubber to catch her. Next, you have the hands themselves. To fill the frame, they used over 100 pairs of specifically made latex sleeves that looked like gnarled arthritic limbs. While many were foam rubber props to fill the background, roughly 150 of them were the actual hands of puppeteers reaching through the pre-cut holes to interact with the actors in real time. But the real magic is the puppeteering. The movement wasn't random, it was a master class in coordination. To form the talking faces, puppeteers had to stack their hands together often with three people making one face. One formed the eyes while another formed the mouth and a third created a nose. All in perfect sync performing to pre-recorded dialogue.

Free hugs. — The alien? Yeah, she's an animatronic. I believe it's all just a practical animatronics like their little alien gag. Aliens is another film loaded with creative genius, which is no surprise coming from a James Cameron and Stan Winston production. But one of the most impressive effects in the film is the epic alien queen. The high-tech nightmare started as a rough test made from black garbage bags, foam, and ski poles. The team built a full-size garbage bag queen to see if the design and movement would be convincing before committing to the real thing. For the finished film, they built a full-size queen as a practical puppet supported by rigs and a crane system. Regular creature suit methods weren't enough at that scale, so they used mechanical systems and hydraulics to handle the big tilts of her body and the swing of her neck. Inside the queen's upper body were two puppeteers. Each one controlled a large outer arm and a smaller inner arm, giving those limbs the kind of twitchy organic motion that's hard to achieve with machinery alone. Around them, a larger team of off-camera operators handled the legs, tail, and other movements using rods, cables, and remote controls. They also built several queen head and neck assemblies including tougher versions for action and more refined versions for close-ups. These used intricate cable and mechanical systems to control the jaws, lips, and inner mouth so the queen could snarl, bite, and breathe with a lot of precision. And all of that work paid off with Aliens winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and an iconic movie monster that holds up to this day.

Bummer, bro. — Iconic. I mean, there's definitely worse ways to die. I feel like those 2 seconds of falling would be kind of interesting. Alan Rickman falling is falling into a green screen pit for sure, but that wide, that's definitely a stunt high fall. That's the movements of his hair and his suit jacket that feel so real. So it feels like they just dropped him below a green screen and then the wide tilting down of the mannequin is for realsies. The Hans Gruber fall at the end of Die Hard is a mixture of performance, stunt work, and movie trickery in perfect harmony. To get that close-up of Alan Rickman dropping away from the window, the crew built a high platform that they could hang him from and then drop him on cue into a blue

screen airbag. In one of the takes, Rickman was told that they would release him on the count of three, but they instead dropped him early so that split second of surprise you see on his face isn't acting, it's genuine shock as he suddenly plummets into the pad below. For the wider shot, the production team turned to a stunt performer using a controlled descent rig instead of a true free fall, dropping the stuntman down the side of the building before disappearing behind foreground elements, giving the illusion of a long deadly drop while still keeping that fall carefully managed. Bare feet are also a huge part of Die Hard's tension, but they were never going to let Bruce Willis actually shred his feet on broken glass. Instead, the effects team literally built him new feet. They took molds of Willis's feet and created special silicone boots shaped like bare feet with tough rubber soles on the bottom for protection. And in the glass scenes, he's not really barefoot, he's wearing these fake feet that slip over his own, which then got blended with makeup so on camera they just look like skin. And this trick shows up all over movies. In The Lord of the Rings, Weta Workshop made thousands of oversized hobbit feet, casting them from the actors' real feet and building them in foam latex so the actors could run around safely with giant hairy toes. And then there's Jackie Chan who took this idea to a whole different level of commitment. While filming 1995's Rumble in the Bronx, he broke his ankle jumping onto a hovercraft, but instead of shutting down filming, he wore a medical cast with a special cover painted to look like his white sneaker and kept doing stunts on it because Jackie Chan.

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That is just pure '90s goodness. From the bird's-eye view, of the explosion is real. Close-up is a miniature, which makes me guess the wide is a miniature as well. — He's on green screen in his little seat that he's been ejected out of and you could either have a camera coming at him as he's stationary or both. Him moving, I can't tell if it's the camera that's moving or if he's just on a rig that comes close and pulls him away. But he's on a green screen and then a miniature of the explosion. For John McClane's midair escape in Die Hard 2, they started by building the shot around a real ejection seat mounted on a special rig. The effects team welded a framework to the seat and hung it from a vertical post in front of a blue screen with Bruce Willis strapped in while motors spun the chair end over end. A roughly 100-ft dolly track was laid down so the camera could race towards him as he spun, and Willis performed his actions slowly in deliberate movements even though the camera was running at normal speed. So later they could skip print the footage, which dropped selected frames so they got this faster chair spin while his performance stayed normal speed. But even with that long camera move, he didn't grow enough in frame so they took the blue screen element to a motion control optical printer and added another precise zoom on top of that, giving that much longer distance traveled. And due to the scheduling needs, Bruce Willis actually shot his ejection seat performance before the exploding plane miniature was filmed, which meant the effects team had to guess what that final lighting and composition would be in advance, making the end result that much more impressive.

Oh, this one? Straight witchcraft. — This has got to be one of the greatest shots ever captured. This is not filmmaking. This is some black magic. — I don't get it. — Yeah, that one is like probably an all-timer, question mark of like Guys, and what? How? You did that? Okay, I'm going to guess that they just shot her and then comped it into the mirror. Locked off insert medicine cabinet. Black magic, witchcraft. You all pay penance for the rest of your life to some entity or god because you pulled this off. You've probably seen this shot a dozen times and even when you know how it was done, it still feels like visual magic. The filmmakers essentially built the moment out of three pieces. First, they shot young Ellie running down the hallway toward the bathroom with the camera tracking backward in front of her as she reached out like she's about to grab the medicine cabinet. The second shot was of the bathroom cabinet set up from the mirror side with a blue screen where the mirror would be. The camera pulls back from the blue as a hand comes in and opens the cabinet door, all carefully matching speed to that first shot. For the third shot, they filmed a clean bathroom element for what appears in the reflection when the cabinet door then closes. In post, the hallway run was flipped, warped, and composited into the blue screen mirror area of the cabinet shot, and then the final bathroom reflection element was added when the door swung shut. The whole thing is just a 2D composite of precisely timed pieces, plus tiny details like the beveled edge on the glass and the smudges on the mirror. And it still holds up as an incredibly seemingly impossible shot to this day.

Bro. Woah. I don't know why more people don't think of Titanic as a horror movie. I'm pretty sure all the wide shots they did a massive miniature of the ship, and then actually built all the stuff that they're on like on a rig that's moving. I think, based on some of the stunt performers, they actually do rotate that practical boat, and then it feels like they have some miniature stuff in the water of the boat kind of capsizing like that. For yet another James Cameron film, this sinking ship sequence in Titanic is another blend of practical effects and CGI. To pull it off, they built multiple versions of the ship. Large-scale miniatures for wide breakups and sinking shots like this shot here, which was done by lowering the stern miniature into a water tank in slow motion. Then they filmed stunt performers against green on the back railing and filled the rest in with CG actors. One of the standouts, though, was this highly detailed large-scale miniature of the entire ship used for key breakups and sinking moments like this here. It featured extensive surface detailing down to individually placed rivet patterns to match historical reference photographs. They also constructed an enormous near full-size replica of the Titanic in Mexico. The vertical dimensions were built at full scale, though the overall length was shortened so it could fit in that huge outdoor tank. This massive exterior set sat on a support structure that allowed sections to be tilted as the ship sank, with the bow end built over a deeper pit so it could drop further into the water while blue screen or green screen surrounded it for later digital extensions. For some sinking shots, the support systems under that bow section was modified so it could float on buoyancy blocks and then be pulled down in a controlled way with cable and hydraulic rigs. Selling the illusion of a massive ship going under without sacrificing the set. For close-up stunt work, they built full-size portions that could be raised to steep angles, letting extras cling to the railings and slide down the deck while secured with hidden cables, pads, and soft materials, turning a controlled but convincing stunt into a terrifying on-screen moment.

They clearly just did this. James Cameron is insane. That feels a little bit like miniature, but also could have just been them just doing it. — A lot of the water stuff is all coming in practically with a lot of those extras in the middle. But the pullback down the hallway is miniatures. Yeah, all the flooding they just did that. They just flooded all of it. They didn't just sink the exterior sets for the film, they sank the interior sets, too. For the flood sequences in Titanic, they built some interior sets inside massive tanks so whole rooms could actually go underwater. These sets were mounted on rigs that could tilt and drop into the water so the set would lower and the water would rise, giving everything a very unnerving realism. For the iconic dome and grand staircase moments, they used huge dump tanks suspended above the set, releasing tons of water in one go. And this is supposed to be in freezing cold water, but of course you can't have the actors submerged in that, so visible breath was added later by filming real breath elements separately and compositing them into the shots. And with those two elements combined, you not only believe the boat is sinking, you can feel the cold along with it.

Armageddon. I'm craving one, you know. Wow, every frame is Dutch. — Just let it happen. That's fun. You know me, you know what I'm going to guess? Miniature. Feels like some miniature practical explosions, and then kind of the wave feels like they had some sort of sandy dusty table, and they were able to do some like vibration stuff. But it feels like they actually did do some sort of like explosion with like a ton of dirt on like a rig that made it all bounce up. Yeah, that feels practical, but with digital elements layered onto it. For the Paris asteroid hit in 1998's Armageddon, like other shots on this list, the filmmakers used a handful of complicated elements to combine into one epic shot. And as is the case with almost all expensive and complicated shots like this, it was storyboarded and pre-visualized to get the composition and timing of the shot approved before starting production. The main element here is the shockwave blasting toward the camera. This was done practically by building a flat top island out of sand, about 100 ft long and 9 ft deep, graded to roughly 8° so that as the blast approached, the camera would naturally tilt up toward the sky. Steel sheets were laid down on the ground and welded together to form a solid foundation to force all the blast energy upward. And on top of this, they arranged about 6,000 ft of primacord in 80 concentric rings, then covered the cord with roughly a foot of sand and mulch to enhance the debris effect. These rings were detonated just 5/1000 of a second using a custom computer-controlled relay system. In real time, the full detonation only lasted 0. 4 seconds, but they filmed with a very high-speed camera and stretched it to 15 seconds of on-screen footage. The initial impact flash was created by detonating aluminum powder, producing the bright white burst that starts the destruction. For the environment, that was done with CG. Paris was recreated in Maya from aerial and satellite imagery, with most buildings represented as simple blocks and photographic textures projected onto them rather than fully modeled geometry. But the foreground was practical again. The small piece of set and breakable gargoyles were built on a stage in front of a blue screen. They then used air cannons to blast debris toward the camera, which was then composited with the CG city and the practical shockwave plate to get their final shot. I love looking back on how

these classic effects were accomplished. They were all made at a time where the artists had major limitations, forcing constant ingenuity in their creative problem-solving. And because of that, many of them hold up to this day. It's a great lesson that memorable effects don't have to be the most realistic, but instead focus on the illusion of realism by combining the best from man, machine, and computer to create visual spectacle. But that's it for today. If you're looking for more amazing effects, we have a playlist in the notes below with all of our other episodes. And until next time, don't forget to write, shoot, edit, repeat. See you later. Ta-ta.