‘Hollywood magic’ was a term used to refer to the beautifully constructed practical effect sets that allowed filmmakers to bring to the screen any manner of creations, from otherworldy castles set in a magical land to alien spaceships looming in the sky. Nowadays, almost every special effect can be boiled down to being done with CGI.
The process is simple, but a very expensive one. And the results are not always ideal. That is why the following films decided to roll up their sleeves and come up with their own practical effects, most of which could be accomplished after a quick trip to the hardware store.
The Recombining Terminator
Terminator 2 is usually cited as one of the best action films ever made, and a lot of the credit goes to the villain, a silent, relentless Terminator model that has the ability to melt and reform its body to recover from any injury. One of the most iconic scenes in the movie shows the Terminator’s metal-liquid body reforming back together into a single entity.
This otherworldly effect was achieved with the help of a beaker of mercury and a blow dryer. All the crew had to do was spill the viscous liquid on the floor. As it spread slowly across the area, a blow dryer blew its metallic droplets into different directions. The whole sequence was simply shown in reverse to create the impression of the Terminator reforming from the liquid.
Big Wizard Small Hobbit
To make Frodo and the other hobbits look tiny compared to everyone else in the Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson used forced perspective in most of their scenes. That means the camera was placed at such an angle that the hobbits, even though they were much further away, looked to be positioned right next to other actors.
This made it seem as if the hobbits were much smaller, even though they were simply further away. Special furniture and wagons were constructed to help sell the effect.
T-Rex Makes Water Ripple
Few scenes in the original Jurassic Park inspired as much dread as the single shot of a glass of water rippling silently from the heavy tread of an approaching T-Rex. Director Steven Spielberg searched long and hard to find a way to cause the perfect circular ripples. He finally found it, not in some sophisticated machinery, but a guitar chord.
Michael Lantieri, who was in charge of dinosaur effects, picked away at his guitar until he hit upon the exact note which would cause the glass of water to ripple the way Spielberg wanted.
Captain Kirk Mask
The original Halloween introduced the world to Michael Myers, and what made the silent serial killer so particularly terrifying was his white, misshapen mask which had the barest resemblance to an actual human. The original mask was not made by a special team of horror experts who knew just how to make it so peculiarly bereft of human emotion.
Instead, the props team found an old Star Trek mask modeled after the likeness of the character of Captain Kirk. They took the mask, messed up the hair, painted it white and widened the eyeholes. Thus was born one of the most enduring pieces of horror imagery in history.
Mirrors For Space Jump
In J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek film, they had a scene showing Kirk and his team dropping to a planet from orbit in an insane jump. Hanging the actors upside down from wires for the hours it would take to film the scene was not an option. That was when they hit upon a method that was as simple as it was ingenious.
They simply had Chris Pine and the other actors stand on top of mirrors under the open sky to make it seem they were dropping from the heavens. Then they blasted fans into the actor’s faces to give them the windswept look. Finally, they filmed the whole thing from a downward angle to complete the ‘falling from orbit’ look. It all looked so convincing the team barely had to make any changes in post-production.
Windsock Tornado
The Wizard of Oz is one of the classic fantasy films that almost everyone has seen at some point. It opens with a bang, showing a tornado ripping across Kansas before taking Dorothy to the land of Oz. The landscape shown in that scene was a mini model of Kansas countryside. When it was time to portray the tornado, the crew attached a long windsock to a gantry and moved the two in opposite directions to mimic the movement of the tornado.
Sarah Connor’s Double
There is a scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is repairing a hole in the terminator’s head in front of a mirror. While we see what appears to be John Connor, Sarah and the Terminator sitting before their reflections, it is actually their body doubles sitting across from them.
Only Sarah is clearly visible on both sides of the ‘mirror’, and if you were struck by the likeness of the stunt double to the real Sarah, that is because the stunt double was Linda Hamilton’s twin sister, who was also used in another scene where the evil Terminator assumes Sarah’s form.
3D New York City
Escape from New York featured a computerized 3D model of New York that was frankly too expensive for the film’s budget to actually be created. So the special effects department went a different route. They took the mini model of New York that they had already used in other scenes, and went to work on it with green tape and a blacklight. The resulting image looked like a genuine 3D model of the city rather than something created using stuff you could get from your local store.
Throw Like A Superman
In Superman Returns, Clark visits his hometown, where his childhood puppy greets him at his farm. The dog fetches a ball, and Clark winds up and throws the thing clear into the sky, where it presumably clears orbit and is currently somewhere around Jupiter. But since the actual actor who plays the role is not blessed with superhuman strength, the crew rigged a potato gun to fire a ball into the sky at the same moment that Brandon Routh pretended to throw the ball into the air.
From One Dream To Another
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there is a sequence where Jim Carrey’s mind is rapidly deleting old memories even as he tries to recall them. The entire scene has characters and situations popping up all over the place with no rhyme or reason. To shoot the scene, instead of using green screen and editing, the director had all the actors run in and out of the camera’s range for multiple scenes. This means Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet had to change their clothes and portray new emotions for each scene in rapid succession while running in and out of the camera’s sight.
