Behind the Scenes: Making Visual Effects Shot #9

When you hear the term “visual effects shot,” you might think of Spiderman swinging from tall buildings, or explosions or dinosaurs or spaceships. Yes, those are effects shot, and they wow us when we see something fantastical.

But sometimes, a visual effects shot is meant to go UNNOTICED. In the video below, we needed a reaction shot of the character Daniel (played by Jason Wishnov) and didn’t specifically shoot it during production. So we “made” this shot by employing visual effects techniques.

The editor scanned through all the “in-between” footage — everything while the camera was rolling that was between Jason’s dialogue shots. In those moments we found a few seconds that looked like Jason’s character was reacting to something said by another character seated behind him in the car.

But the footage wasn’t perfect for our needs. It was about 2.5 seconds long and we needed it to be 4 seconds. And the timing of when Jason looked into the rearview mirror wasn’t a perfect match for the close-up shot of his eyes that will come before this shot. But with some visual effects magic, we manipulated the shot to make it work.

Now we want to stress that all the credit for this shot goes to Jason. By staying “in the moment,” or in-character, during the entire time the camera was shooting him, he gave us the opportunity to use every second of his takes in ways that go beyond what’s in the shooting script.

In this instance, we needed a shot that will give the audience information about his character in response to what the other characters are talking about. Something we can’t give away to you just yet, but when you see the movie it will all make sense.

So the video below shows how we “created” this shot. It’s not an explosion or spaceship type of special effect, but it took several hours to build nonetheless. And while we hope you enjoy the obvious special effects shots in Broken Spirits (yes we have explosions and lots more!), this is one visual effects shot we hope you DON’T notice as one, but simply enjoy it as part of the story.

Thanks for your support of Broken Spirits!