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March 22, 2005 Volume III, Issue 2
Big
Time Special Effects on an Indie Budget
I define an indie
film as one that is made without studio money or distribution.
Artistically, how does this difference manifest itself?
Frequently, in special effects. Studio films generally
have lots of them; indie films don't.
But it doesn't have
to be that way.
In fact, indie films
can have studio-quality special effects precisely because
so many studio films have them. That's a confusing sentence,
but it's also a fact: indie films can have -- can afford
to have -- studio-quality special effects precisely
because so many studio films have them.
What exactly does
that mean? It means that year in and year out, studios
produce hundreds of effect-laiden films, many of which
prove to be huge commercial losses. Fortunately, the
studios' losses can be indie producers' gains.
Here's how. Let's say you have an indie project that
ideally would have a big subway train crash in it. Because
of budgetary constraints, you're considering cutting
the sequence from the script, but you don't want to
- you believe the sequence would add to the overall
production. So here's what you do: brainstorm with friends
to find a studio movie from years past - which few people
saw - that has a big subway crash in it. "Money
Train" comes to mind. Then, track down the studio
that produced the film and call it. Ask for the "stock
footage licensing department." The studio will
bounce you around to a dozen people, but eventually,
you'll find someone who is in charge of licensing clips
from
past films.
Once you find them,
first ask them if the clips are available from that
film. If not, come up with another film that also has
a suitable sequence. Once you find a film that is available
for licensing, start negotiating a price. You may be
surprised - you may get a 30 second sequence that cost
literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce
for only five to ten thousand dollars. (From the studio's
perspective, this is essentially free money, especially
if the film from which you are licensing footage was
a box office bomb and thus won't cannabalize future
revenue from their movie).
Then, early in pre-production,
make your production team aware of your plan to splice
in footage from the subway train crash from the studio
film into your movie. That way, your set designer can
begin to match the train you plan to shoot the non-crash
part of the sequence on to the train in the clip you
are licensing from the studio.
When you actually
shoot the sequence, your characters would be on a subway
train that has been decked-out to look just like the
subway car in the studio footage. In post, as their
train races towards disaster, you would cut suddenly
to the studio footage of the train crashing, and voila!
You have a half-million dollar crash sequence for maybe
$50,000.
I have used this
technique to simulate a train crashing with footage
from "Money Train", a plane crashing using
footage from "Turbulence," and a stadium blowing
up using footage from several seventies disaster movies.
The process works, all the better when you spend lots
of time in preproduction carefully matching your production
set to the set used in the studio footage. THE END
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