It is very amazing to learn about how
much time and how many special effects are needed in order to produce a movie
that can look as realistic as possible. There is need for stunt men, scale models,
dummies, various stages, and much, much more. Out of all the possible things needed
to capture a satisfying visual, we will be looking at how directors attempt to
create realistic jumps from very high places. The two films in this discussion
will be the Titanic and and the Dark Knight Rises.
Titanic- When the ship
hits the iceberg, the ship begins to sink and people begin jumping off. Already,
the ship is actually just a large set in which people can act on. When the
director needed to show a steeper degree of sinking, then the cameras were
tilted more as they modified the back drops. To show that people were jumping
from the tallest part of the ship, the actors were made to wear black suits and
jump off small set ups with large ranging motion. Once the directors got these
recorded they used the motion to catch the gravity and weight of the person in
order to add CG to the rest of the fall. This was done because the actors, even
the stuntmen, could get injured badly.
Dark Knight Rises- In this movie,
the director was all about doing as much as he could with actual events. There is
a scene in the movie where the airplane gets damaged in the air. Rather than
using scaling objects or CG in order to fulfill the action, the director actually
has stunt men in the air hanging off of the airplane with the cameras rolling
from inside a helicopter to catch the action.
Whether it was the time in which
the movie was made or whether it depended on the director, the requirements for
both jumps varied. However, both seemed very realistic. The shot in the Titanic
was during the night, so the person falling from up high off the ship didn’t
have to be clear, as long as the shadowed movements seemed real. In the Dark Knight,
the fact that no special computer effects were used helped showcase the honest
jumps in the particular scene.
