Your best success stories... based on people's reactions.

Hey. The other day I compiled a couple of home-made CGI explosions with some existing ones and footage of me in my living room, holding a match over the fireplace as I turned the knob. The resulting effect was a great, totally real looking 'splosion.

I showed this to my mommy. Bad. Choice.

She screamed at me and started hitting me and stuff. "Don't you______light____fires in this_____you____!!!!!!!!"


Well, sorta like that. Anyway, I was just wondering what your all time favorite responses were to stuff you did...?

 

The 'special effect' in "Young Jedi: High School Student" we got the most compliments and questions about was when I used the Force to open a door.

It was just a guy standing behind the door pushing it open! The simplest effect in the whole piece!



Rick McCallum loves you!

 

A couple months ago I did a star-wars style video for my government class. It was based on a supreme court case-- Marbury vs. Madison.

In one of the scenes, I played all of the Supreme Court justices-- my most ambitious cloning attempt. One of the teachers who watched this movie burst out laughing during this scene, exclaiming, "They're all wearing the same clothes!"

Edit: Stupid faces-->

 

He i whant to see your FX test, i whant to see you BURN!


C.J

 

Are you from Iowa?!? DO YOU KNOW BOB?!?

Classic, classic quote.


Oh, and I loved the reaction of everyone when I showed them my Force Jump test. Basically just a reversed shot of my brother falling (with style) off our deck. It looks very good, and no one could figure out how we did it.


?Eaglet

 

When I made myself disappear in Movie Spoof, all I did is use a cross-fade between the shot of me and the background and people went crazy over it. They also went crazy over the lightsabers and lightning!

 

yea... everytime i do an effect that involves me reversing the footage... nobody knows how i did it...

Example... lightsaber grabs, force jumps, smoke being sucked in, taking fire off a candle.....

 

My last FX test with the superfast run and cloning was a MUCH bigger hit than I expected.
I ended up writing my cloning tutorial from it, too.

 

I flustered my mother a bit with a piece I did for one of our kids club specials... I had our show host apparently piloting an FA-18 fighter straight down the main street downtown, around the skyscrapers, and then dive-buzzing a city bus... it looked fantastic....

She was the risk manager (benefits and insurance) for the city at the time, and wanted assurances that I had NOT really somehow flown a plane downtown...

Fenn

 

Best response I've ever had was a month or so ago. Science teacher had his powerbook hooked up with his projector, showing sound waves and stuff, so me and my friend asked if we could show one of our fights and maybe some others. We showed ours then Duality, and for like the next couple of weeks I don't think I could walk down the halls without people asking me stupid crap.

I can't stand stupid annoying highschoolers... *sigh*

 

When we made Tai-Kwon-Dough for Art class, everyone was amazed with the bluescreening, which was actually all hideous crap, compared to what we could be capable of, but we were pressed for time.

 

My first special effect I ever did was a simple cloning for a Lord of the Flies video for english. I swear, if I heard another person ask me "How'ed you do that?!!!" I would have gone insane.

 

Back in the day - Photoshop 1.0 was this new computer image thing- we had to work with real props and stuff. In my French class we made this commercial for V8 where the X-Wing pilot only had a doughnut for breakfast and couldn't fly straight. He ended up getting shot down by a TIE pilot who was drinking a V8. For our set we made the top of a cockpit out of cardboard. Then we took two rolls of black paper (you know like they use for the bulletin board) and just poked a bunch of holes in them. Then we put lamps behind the paper so the stars would shine. We cut between those clips and clips from the movie, and dubbed our french lines over the top. It looked so fake but everyone afterward was like "Wow! How'd you do that?" I felt pretty cool that day.

 

i too did a lord of the flies project(i posted a green screen test of it about a week or two ago). i showed it in class today with a couple other differnt backdrops and everyone was like "wow". that and the first time i ever bluescreened in 6th grade with my blue bed sheets and adobe premiere(everything in the video was transparent). i think it was just the fact that i was 11 years old and doing this.

-bert

 

I've never really impressed anyone with an effect or anything, but last summer my father excitedly called me from Missouri and said he had just seen his Grandson on cable TV. The Sci-Fi channel was airing one of their promos for the fan film contest special that Kevin Smith hosted and they used a quick clip of my son in his cockpit from "Power of the Sith" for one of the spots. I was shocked cause I had no idea they would even use anything from my film for that special and I had never mentioned anything to my Dad about the show. Turns out he was just geeking out on the sci-fi channel and his grandkid just pops up on his widescreen TV. That was pretty nifty.

 

That's cool.

One my cooler experiences was just last quarter. I was taking a film production course with some students who didn't know what they were doing and some who very much did. We were instructed to do an editing exercise, and at the time I was nearly finished with the first half of Ryan vs. Dorkman, so I brought that in. It had no sound and several of the shots were not rendered, but hey, this was an editing exercise, right?

So he plugs it in and the teacher never lets us talk about what we're about to show. Just plays it, has a discussion, then lets the maker speak. So he plugs it in. Everybody's chuckling at the titles since it's kind of an over-the-top gag. But as soon as the lightsabers started blazing it was the most silent thing I'd ever heard. Freakishly silent... nobody dared breathe for the whole sequence. They were really impressed. A very cool little show.

 

Ryan I had a simular experiance.


For english we had to a video project on a book we read. SO I just grabed some star wars novel and read it. For the video I made only about 1 minute lightsaber battle with 45 seconds opening credits, and one 1 and a half minute of end credits totalling about 3 minutes..anyhoo.
First everyone is talking through the opening credits looking at the screen then they all just sort of stop and kind of go..woah what the? And then everything faded black and falded back in with a lightsaber battle and everyone just forze. I thought they hated it or something. After the ending credits were done the teacher walks over turns on the lights and everyone in the class was like...How..did..you...do that?

Best.Felling.EVer.

 

I made a little fx test using Final Cut my senior year of high school. Alls I did was create a few layers of me doing the Matrix Agent "bullet-dodging" movements, lowered the opacity, and added some motion blur. I was pretty happy with my little Matrix test, even though it could of been a lot better. Anyhoo, my Multi-Media (as we called it) teacher was so amazed by it, as were all my friends who saw it!

Even though I've graduated, I'm still remembered for being the King of Multi-Media class though my skills and knowledge hardly compare to most of the people on this board.

 

Well, once I passed a whole week rotoscoping my first lightsaber test frame by frame in Photoshop. The result was very good and I was really proud of it. I went to my parents house to show it to them and the rest of my brothers but they were much more impressed by a lame clone test I did with Final Cut. It was very simple, just a static camera showing me sitting on the left of the sofa and then me again entering and sitting on the right. A very simple 8 point garbage matte, but everybody was "WOW! How did you do that?!?"

My poor lightsaber test was completely forgotten....snif, snif...

 

About a month ago we had to do a project for our reading class. We had to make a movie out of a fairy tail. Of course I gave it a star wars twist to it. All I put in it was lightsabers, force lightning, and force jump. Occasionally people still bring up the question "How did you do that???"

I just don't know how to handle these questions.

 

I have two moments that I won't forget.

My first film, an homage to the waiting fans endured getting tickets for Episode I, played to a near sold out theater in the NY International Independent Film and Video Festival. Being that it was my first film ever, I was very nervous. It is a comedy, and all I asked was that I didn't get booed. Not only did they not boo, but I had some people rolling in the aisles! During the one scene where the main character is picked up by drag queens, I had three girls two rows in front of me laughing until the end of the film. At the end, I got a standing ovation. It was great. I'll never forget that day in July of 2000.

My second film was produced at my school, since it dealt with college students. It was fortunate enough to not only play at the same NY Festival as my first one, but also an online festival (IndieKino Film Festival in 2000). The cool part was having a school paper article done on me, and when the film played on the internet during the festival, I went around to visit my friends in the dorms, and most of them were watching my movie! That was cool.