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MAN ON FIRE. Visual Effects Technique.
Denzel Washington’s ‘Man on Fire’ movie had some great film effects. I’m curious how these effects were created. I have a general idea of how they were created but if anyone has experience creating that sort of sureal image offset and blur, I’d love to hear how you did it.
Thanks in advance.
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3 Replies
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Just watched that recently and I had a director go on and on about how amazing it was. Mmmm, it’s nice and gritty and tons and tons of overlay. So Get your time warp tools out and layer everything and use mix modes .. it does pay to have some tone feeling to it all, they really colorized each layer so it would mix well and not cuase over hotspots or really dark tones. But it’s really a SALT to taste effect and something that isn’t too hard use LEVELS / CURVES to control the layers and then ADD/SCREEN/OVERLAY/MULTIPLY for your mix modes and you’ll end up with something neat. Then use time displacement on some layers (salt to taste) and time strech on others, and then box blur on some others (adjusting opacity and mixmodes to taste) the good’ol’white flash (top layer, white solid .. ADD mode, and then just 0 it .. square jump it too 80% and then linear slide it down to 0 over 10 frames). Um, yeah .. that’s about it .. uses some really SLOW dissolves too which is real nice .. ok, hope that’s of use .. Did I say layers? yeah, you need loads of layers to get this look 😛
..::hunz..
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A lot of that was just color correction and editing different in-camera techniques together.
For example, the surreal time warpy stuff is editing using the flash frames and bits of handcranked camera. It may seems strange, but you can get hardware to handcrank an ARRI 435. So you’re using a modern camera and film, but handcranking. This gives the film that weird, time distorted, freaky exposure. Obviously the sloppier you do it, the more bizarre it is. They would take certain shots and run an additional camera and manually crank it to have bits to edit in.
Obviously flash frames from any film camera is an exposure and time warp effect since the film slows to a halt, then speeds back up to speed. Just simply choose to use these bits in the edit.
As far as the look, Stefan Sonnenfeld did the Color Correction. No big trick there, just choose to be that extreme (and talented at color correction). Add Color Finesse to a clip and go to town. If you clip the whites (turn on the soft knee limiter), darken the blacks. Push the blacks toward a cyanish, the mids very yellow/green and the whites toward baby blue you should get pretty close.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I might add that I seem to remember they also did the camera out of phase thing for the vertical smear. Which is where you put the gate out of sync with the claw pulling the next frame of film. So instead of the film being advanced in the cam only while the gate shuts off the light, it advances a little while the gate still exposes light making a vertical smear.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com
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