When photographing toys, there are so many tricks that can make your scenes look lifelike and realistic. To add an extra kick to certain scenes, you might need to create mini-explosions, all of which can all be done with practical effects. In this video, Norm from Adam Savage’s Tested hosts toy photographer Johnny Wu. He guides you through his process for creating blast effects in his toy photography and shares some handy tips and tricks that you can use in your work.
That insane car chase in Fast Five was shot using a real 9,000lb vault
The Fast & Furious franchise is notorious for using CG in their movies. Even though they have very highly trained stunt drivers, and even gave the actors some rather intensive driving lessons, some things are just easier and safer when done with CG. But they also do a surprising amount of effects practically, when possible.
One sequence that seemed fairly obvious as CG in the imaginatively titled fifth instalment of the series, Fast Five, sees our heroes dragging a 9,000lb vault containing $100 million through the streets of Rio De Janeiro (although it was actually filmed in Puerto Rico). Except, it wasn’t CG, it was shot for real, with a real 9,000lb vault.
These fast cars photos are actually made with toy cars and practical effects
You may remember Hungarian photographer Lampert Benedek and his fun LEGO photo series. While heavy snow is covering my hometown, I noticed Lampert’s image of a car caught in a snow blizzard. But seeing a BTS image made me realize: it’s not really a car, and it’s not even real snow!
Lampert makes some awesome photos of fast cars, but he uses toys, practical effects, and some clever ideas to make them look real. I chatted with him a bit about how he does it, and he shares some tricks for making these images.
Quick Tip: Use sticky page markers to simulate light leaks on your digital camera
This quick tip comes courtesy of Ireland-based photographer Maciej Pietuszyński. It’s a simple and easy way to get a film light leak style effect in-camera with digital. All you need is your camera, a lens and a few sticky page markers.
An artist created this spooky pumpkin photo using practical effects and lighting
Halloween is a holiday that can spark our creativity in different areas: decorating the home, carving pumpkins, or creating costumes. And of course, it sparks imagination in photographers as well.
Inspired by Halloween, Felix Hernandez has created a spooky photo of pumpkin on fire that looks like it just got out of a horror movie. As always, he used practical effects, lighting, and patience to achieve all the effects he wanted, and he kindly shares with DIYP some details about this spooky shot.
See how Apple used real fire and practical effects for new Apple Watch faces
Regular as clockwork, every year, Apple announces their new products and mobile operating system updates. And that includes their line of watches. The new WatchOS 5 comes with new dynamic faces. Designed to work with the Apple Watch Series 4, these new faces are not CG as we might first think. They were actually made using practical effects.
The new faces include Fire & Water, Vapour and Liquid Metal. They can be configured in numerous ways, and animate when you raise your arm to look at your watch. Cool Hunting posted this minute-long video to show how they were made and we see some pretty cool techniques.
How to make 3 great practical effects for your videos
Filmmaker Daniel DeArco is big fan of DIY. If you follow his social media, you’ll see that he comes up with all kinds of self-built solutions to overcome the challenges he faces in his productions. Not all of these projects are to solve a technical problem, though. Sometimes it’s for visual effect. And in this video, he talks about three of the practical effects he made for a recent video.
Scandinava makes insane practical VFX that look like CGI
Russian film studio Scandinava makes insane effects that will make you think are CGI – but they’re actually all real. Using practical VFX, a robotic arm, miniature models and other gear, these artists make the real objects look like they were animated. Check out how they do it in the video below.
The making of ‘HomePod – Welcome Home’ by Spike Jonze is as good as the clip itself
If you have not seen Spike Jonze’s ‘Welcome Home’ ad for the Homepod, you must be living under a rock. Let me fill you in. In the ad, dancer FKA twigs realizes that her home can expand and contract to match her dance moves. It is a visual candy.
The big excitement about the clip comes from the fact that 99% of the clip is not done in a computer, it’s done in camera, by actually creating a real-life sized expanding house (or at least parts of it).
Flood your scene with smoke using these DIY smoke bombs
Fog and smoke can be a wonderfully creative tool for giving your photos and video footage some atmosphere. Both figuratively and literally. While it’s quite easy to do in the studio with a simple fog machine, it gets a little trickier out on location. There’s no place to plug in for power, and battery operated fog machines are expensive and often a little underwhelming outdoors.
That’s when you might have to just make your own. And in this video from the Deadlance Steamvlog, we find out how. It uses some pretty basic materials, just some stump remover and sugar. But the results are rather impressive.
