SPFX Keeping It Real

Rain, storms, snow… there are certain things that even Weta Digital can’t fake. The art of physical special effects will likely be around a while longer, despite the increasing presence of digital visual effects on our screens. Film Effects’ Brendon Durey talks to Carolyn Brooke about what goes on behind the illusion, keeping the team safe and adapting to change.

Largely thanks to Richard, Sir Peter and the rest of the team at Miramar, digital visual effects (VFX) for screen production has advanced hugely in recent years. We marveled at Terminator 2: Judgement Day back in 1991 and were astounded at 2009’s Avatar and now nearly four years on, the technology just keeps getting better. No one knows this more so than Film Effects’ Brendon Durey, who says his craft’s future is about adaption.

“VFX is starting to look a lot better, for years it didn’t look good,” Durey says. “In many ways, especially in the film and TV side, physical special effects are a dying art.”

Although, he says, there will always be a place for the live element of shots that you can’t VFX. “It’s about getting performance out of an actor also, much harder when nothing is actually happening. Another problem is that you can still kind of tell 100% digital people and the audience doesn’t end up having much empathy for the character.”

The plates and composites (comps) required for VFX create another type of work also. It’s all part of the process of shooting real elements against a black, blue, or green screen that are later layered into a shot. This tends to look better than something 100% digital, created in full by a CGI operator.

For the time being however, Durey has plenty of work on the go the old-fashioned way especially with setting scenes weather wise.

A large part of SPFX is atmospherics – making scenes misty, foggy, rainy, snowy, windy, and stormy. “People say ‘can I come in and pick up a rain machine’, there is no such thing as a rain machine. It’s a huge collection of hoses, pumps, towers, and spinners, you need guys who know how to use the gear, it’s not a turn a key, push a button and away she goes environment. People just don’t get what is involved.”

Of course, there is also the dangerous stuff – the fires and the explosions, like managing a house burn safely for six hours during filming, yet not actually letting it burn. Only done, he says, through much experience, communication, testing, planning, and management.

The concept of scale can be hard for people to get their heads around. “Every now and then someone will want some smoke machines out in the crater of Rangitoto Island to try to fake it erupting and you explain to them that an eruption is hundreds of thousands of tons being shot thousands of kilometers in the air. It’s a volcano and a smoke machine, it’s not going to work, it’s just physics.”

Long-running shows like Power Rangers and Spartacus have been huge for Durey’s team, especially Spartacus as no one expected it to be so big. “You’re in an age where everything is lit by fire, everything is cooked on fire and there is no electric lighting.” A lot of time was also spent against green screens squirting blood.

Safety is a huge part of SPFX with the biggest factor usually proximity of the activity to people and equipment. An exclusion zone for safe distances and parameters for people to be in must be established and hazard identification must be done.

People often have no concept of danger, Durey says, or sound – a huge explosion happening too close can literally be deafening.

SPFX crew work closely with both the director and safety officers, at the end of the day everyone tends to agree that no scene is worth someone getting hurt. “You’ve got directors who sometimes act like spoiled children and that’s when we get the safety guy to back us up but then sometimes it might be the safety guy saying ‘I’m uncomfortable with that distance, can we push it back a bit’ and then there will be a negotiation.”

While it’s rare to do something completely new, there is always an unknown element to special effects. Especially when often what someone says they want doesn’t marry up with what they actually want. “It’s a visual medium, so with special effects you have a much greater chance of failure onset than virtually any other department. You may’ve built and tested a rig for a camera angle and then the director says I want to show this from somewhere else and you tell them it doesn’t work and then it doesn’t work, but half the crew don’t understand what’s happened and why it didn’t work.”

The craft is not for the faint-hearted and you don’t learn it at a film school, rather it is years of training. “You have to have a thick skin, your chance of failure on set is high, half the time especially with low-budget stuff, you’re rushing, you’re under-crewed and sometimes you’re even testing on camera.”

You need a good knowledge of rigging, pneumatics (using pressurized gas to produce motion), hydraulics, physics and electronics helps along with the appropriate licenses and usually some first-aid training. For Durey, training came with following his father Ken Durey around film sets. His brother Jason is also in SPFX.

Continuity of work in SPFX is usually more difficult than other craft areas and Durey thinks it’ll only get worse. He’s not expecting a busy 2013, although he says he had the same feeling last year and it turned to be a cracker. One never quite can tell.

Increasing compliance costs continually cause headaches too. The licenses required for pyro and flammable goods alone are in the thousands.

Explaining to production that the old ways are just not possible under the new laws is all too familiar for him. Also, you can’t simply contract out of liability, he says. “Under the new laws, with all the flammable liquids being used by an art department, you actually need a ticketed person on site otherwise it’s completely illegal and not insured, yet I’ve had confused looks from producers who have no idea this compliance is required.”

If something went wrong, the producer would need to demonstrate that all practical steps had been taken to minimize harm or damage to crew or cast. Insurance can be a good gatekeeper, he says, because if someone can’t get insurance then they shouldn’t be doing it.

SPFX budgets tend to be low in New Zealand, yet content expectations are usually high. Even the producers who understand what’s behind SPFX still don’t budget enough.

“When you’re doing things at break-neck pace with lesser crew than normal, with a limited amount of prep and testing time – you have to be very conscious that the corners being cut aren’t around safety.”