PUMPKINROT.COM: The Blog: special effects

Thursday, July 6, 2023

Spoiler Alert: The Black Hole - The Ending

The final nightmarish scenes from The Black Hole are below. Imagine seeing this as a young child at a friend's house, on a VCR. His family is sitting in the living room, excited that a Disney film has just been brought home from Four Star Video at the local strip mall. Surely, it'll be just like Star Wars.

Surely.

Click below...

Sunday, March 13, 2022

We Cannot Win This

Man, I'd compare the effects in this film to the first time I saw that T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Never had a headless effect been done with this kind of realism. I'd dare say it was elegant and beautiful.

And it has yet to be topped.

Click below to watch...

Thursday, February 3, 2022

The Pilot

I reject that expensive fan film called Prometheus.

The creature below is exactly that: A creature. An alien being.

And definitely NOT some blue humanoid in an elephant-bone space suit.
Lies. Prometheus was all lies. The King of Lies.

Click below and tell me that thing is just a space suit.

Friday, June 3, 2016

20 Behind-the-Scenes Photos That Prove Practical Effects Will Always Be Better

Fun entry over at dreadcentral.com (that last line is hilarious[and true]):

What can really be said about practical effects that hasn’t already been said? There’s no denying that the horror genre was at its game-changing best when the blood was Karo syrup and the monsters played by men in costumes, and there’s also no denying that something was lost when makeup effects artisans were mostly replaced by computers.

Seriously. Watch Carpenter’s The Thing and The Thing (2011) side-by-side. You’ll cry.

Click below for the article:

I kinda blame practical effects for my interest in Yard Haunting. I feel like movies in my youth were inspirational things where you spent so much time wondering how something was made, and then wanting to make something similar. My brother made Slimer from Ghostbusters. We'd make eyeballs and fake blood and dummies to scare our mom. We made super 8mm movies with burning spaceships and stop-frame animated dinosaurs. It was time-consuming stuff, and it always seemed to be during the brutally hot days of Summer vacation. It was great.

Do kids today get inspired watching CG creatures? I have no idea. I recall that feeling of knowing something was tangible and that someone was inside, below, or out-of-frame controlling it, making it live. There were like six guys who made Jabba the Hutt come to life...four of them were stuffed inside. Crazy.

Friday, December 18, 2015

Behind The Scenes At Weta

Found this neat video. If you haven't seen KRAMPUS (you should probably go this weekend) this video contains a ton of spoilers.
Love seeing stuff like this. Reminds me of the old Industrial Light and Magic days of movie magic.

Click below:

Friday, July 10, 2015

Weta On Krampus

And we’ve just done another Legendary movie, called Krampus, that director, Michael Dougherty, he came down and embraced physical effects to an extreme level. Maybe 80% of that movie has been produced through puppetry. I can’t talk about that, but we’ve done lots of puppet work, it was a wonderful experience.

The article here.