The Cult of Magic


Back in the early days of magic, before you could go to your local bookstore or magic shop and buy a copy of David Pogue's Magic for Dummies (Hungry Minds), magic was a dark art practiced by masters sequestered in private clubs and learned by a handful of apprentices. The roots of the word "magic" refer to the Magi, the members of the Zoroastrian priesthood. I don't suppose it gets much more sequestered than that.

Visual effects, those skillful re-creations of reality, have been an art form since the beginning of filmmaking; just watch 1900's Trip to the Moon by George Meliés (Figure I.1). In fact, the earliest films capitalized on two phenomena above all others: the startling realism of the medium and the ability to make up scenes that were impossible to create any other way.

Figure I.1. Trip to the Moon is sometimes called the first visual effects film


But until the 1990s, special effects post-production for movies was a craft known only to a few hundred practitioners worldwide, and the dark art of its practices (often photo-chemical, sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated, almost always labor-intensive and fraught with treacherously little room for error) was largely known only to them, passed on in a guild-like fashion to those few apprentices who found their way to this strange specialization (Figure I.3).

Figure I.3. A torture device? Only according to your point of view. An optical printer such as this one was the sole means of compositing film prior to the digital age.


The earliest public motion picture display by the Lumière brothers (Figure I.2) reputedly included footage of a train pulling into a station that had the poor naive audience diving to the floor in panic, believing a real train was headed their way. Louis Lumière evidently grew quickly tired of this spectacle, famously declaring a short time later, "The cinema is an invention without a future."

Figure I.2. The Lumière borthers. Louis Lumière famously declared, "The cinema is an invention without a future."



Enter the color desktop computer, then Adobe Photoshop, then After Effects, and suddenly anyone with a few thousand bucks for equipment, or access to borrow it, could have a go at creating a visual effects shot. And have a go people did, creating visionary low-budget videos (as well as hundreds of Star Wars tribute films) and growing the professional visual effects community exponentially.

A 2004 survey by an Adobe product manager turned up some 250 Hollywood features that had relied on After Effects. Stu Maschwitz, author of Chapter 15, "Learning to See," led the Rebel Mac group at Industrial Light + Magic for several years in the 1990s; their use of After Effects on big-budget, Academy-nominated effects films was largely unpublicized, mostly due to the perception (even among film studios) that only "big iron" was up to work of that caliber.

Yet the old cultish attitudes in many ways prevailed. Sure, lots of kids proved that they could produce a convincing lightsaber battle on the family computer, but try to learn how to create an elaborate effects shot by reading up on it and you got smoke, mirrors, vagaries, and what has quickly become a cliché of Cinefex magazine (once the source for all kinds of nitty-gritty details): the use of "proprietary software." Visual effects work might as well have been magic because it seemed to be made up of a bunch of exacting techniques crafted by super-geniuses and jealously guarded as trade secrets.

After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques aims to demystify the realm of visual effects, focusing on the skill of re-creating reality with After Effects, of fooling viewers into thinking they are seeing a shot that was taken with a camera all at once.

Think of this book as a basic magic manual, teaching you the visual effects equivalents of hiding a card or palming a coin. If your goal is to be the David Blaine of compositing, you must master the basics that come up again and again, those effects that are often a key part of the most original and fantastic movie sequences.



Adobe After Effects 6. 5 Studio Techniques
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques
ISBN: 0321316207
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 156

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