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Hey, everybody. It's Josh. For this week's Select, I've chosen our episode on special effects from September 2019. It's just a nice straight ahead, S-Y-S-K app from Chuck, the Grabster, and me. If you're into movies, this is going to be a good one for you. So enjoy.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant wearing his Stone Temple Pilates hat. And there's Gerri over there. She's not wearing any hat. She's got really cool hair.

It's not Stone Temple Pilates.

It is, I do. I've seen the Stone Temple Pilates hats before, and that's why.

It is STP because I bought two hats at Autozone yesterday.

I have a champion Spark Plug hat. Yeah, they have good hats.

They really do. I was getting a battery and I was like, I want these two hats. It was a Good Year, Akron, Ohio Good Year hat.

Nice.

Which is where Emily's from. Sure. I wanted that. Then I saw this STP hat.

Stone Temple Pilots hat.

But I would get a champion Spark Plug hat, too. That's great.

Okay, I'll let you borrow mine anytime you want. Just got to give it back.

I don't know if I've ever seen you in a baseball cap.

It's a weird jam. Is it? Not what you want to see.

I've seen you in shorts like twice in twelve years.

I keep the legs covered.

I think one of them was when you came over to borrow my lawn mower.

I remember that, yeah.

Like nine years ago.

Sure. I've got to mow the lawn sometimes.

Now things have changed. You can buy a lawn mower.

Yeah.

That's where we're at now. We can afford lawn mowers.

I can wear shorts, too. I actually have one of those plug-in lawn mowers.

I have a battery-powered lawn mower.

Do you?

Look at us, stupid liberal hippies.

Well, mine's battery-powered, too, but you have to plug it in and charge it.

Oh, yeah.

What kind do you have?

I have the green one.

Yeah, I think they're all green.

No, there's a blue one.

Oh, I've got the green one, too. The Sunjo.

No, but I have a Sunjo pressure washer. Do you really?

Is it battery operated?

No, you plug that in.

I was going to say, I'll bet it just goes like, tinkles out water.

But they do make plug in lawn mowers. It's not a battery. You just have a cord that you walk around.

And run over with your lawn.

I guess they're called electric.

Sure.

But yeah, I got the battery one because I have so little grass now and we may be done, period, with grass.

Oh, yeah, that's right. You're zero-escaping.

Well, we're definitely do in the front, but the back, it just got smaller and smaller. And my last lawn broke, so I was paying a guy to come cut it. I was like, Why am I paying this guy to cut to do a seven minute mow?

There's just that one blade of grass that sees the lawnmower coming like mother.

Yeah, but then I went and got the battery because lawn mowers are terrible for the environment.

Yeah, that's why I got it.

They're one of the worst polluters.

We're both also aware that we are charging our battery-powered lawn mowers with coal fired power.

Yes, we understand that. We know. I'm just talking about exhaust fumes.

I don't even need one. I live in a condo, but I'm so dissatisfied with the landscapers that take care of the condo that I bought. No. Yes. I bought a lawn mower just to do the little patch out in front of our building. Wow. So poor Momo doesn't get lawn grass against her junk when she's pottying.

This is a great way to start this episode.

So we're talking special effects, obviously.

This has been lawn talk.

We're talking special effects, Chuck.

Yes. Movies, special effects, which, boy, we could do 10 parts on this. This is a big summation because movies, special effects can be everything from the movie that you walk out of saying, Oh, that movie had no special effects, when in fact it did. Yeah, wrong. Yeah, just tiny little things that you may not even notice to things that are almost whole cloth special effects, like Sky Captain in the World of Tomorrow.

Yeah, or Sin City.

Yeah, I like both of those. Yes.

Did you know Sin City, every single bit of the set was CGI?

Yeah, and then Sky Captain did it first.

Yeah, a year before, huh?

Yeah, every bit of that. It was a green screen movie.

I never saw it. Was it good?

It was interesting. The look of it was amazing and very much ahead of its time.

Like real Art Deco, right?

Yeah, for sure. I call it black and white, but it wasn't. It was just this really washed-out color. But it looked awesome and was not bad. Nice. I'll have to check it out. I think the dudes that made that quit making movies after that. It's a very unique story.

Have you ever seen, this has nothing to do with anything, but have you seen the Changeling? George C. Scott?

Yeah, sure. Oh, my God. Did you just see that?

Yes. I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever gotten chills more frequently from a movie than I did with that one. Jains was great. It's a genuinely scary ghost story. It is wonderful.

Yeah, I miss George C. Scott, too.

Yeah, he's a good actor. I don't remember who the female lead was in there, but she was great, too.

It's been a while. I haven't seen it in many, many years.

Anyway, special effects. Let's try this again. We're going to get derailed every five seconds, aren't we?

That's okay. Effects are divided, and this is by the Grabster. He helped us out with this. Ed's a big movie guy and horror movie, Sci-Fi guy. Sure. So he probably enjoyed writing this one up. They're divided into three general categories, and this all has to do with where the effect is happening. It can be practical, which is in front of the camera, and that means it's a physical thing that's happening.

I think that's what most people think of when they think special effects. You think? Sure.

Okay.

By most people, I mean me.

In camera effects that happen inside the camera, and then post-production effects. And many times you're using one or all three of these.

Right. So with practical effects, it's things like makeup and prosthetics, like Ed uses the example of David Lynch as the Elephant Man, like the prosthetic makeup that was used to turn John Herd or John Herd. Which one?

Herd.

Into Joseph Marek. Yes. That's a special effect. An explosion on set, that's a special effect. A blood packet to make it look like somebody just got shot in the chest. A squib. That's a special effect. All three of those are practical effects. They're actually happening in the physical world in front of you on set, being captured on film. That's a practical special effect.

Yeah. And the other one I wanted to mention there that you might not think of as stuff like if there is a fire, like a fireplace in a scene, and then you flip the camera around to show the people and you see that fire shimmering on the wall. That's a practical effect, too. Little things like that.

But it's lighting. It's a lighting effect.

Yeah, or it's a fire. Like, those aren't real fires. I mean, it's real fire.

It's Somebody should put that out.

But it's not like someone lights a bunch of wood. They put fake wood, and they have these fire bars. It's like what you have under your grill, basically. Right. Or like- They hide those, and then that's your fire. Sure. Because it has to look perfect You can't just chance somebody not being able to start a fire or looking wonky. That's why movie fires look perfect. Yeah. Because they're fake.

They are dreamy. They're so good. So in camera effects is just basically messing with the way the film is being produced inside the camera. Not what's going on in reality that the film is capturing, but how the film is actually capturing this stuff.

Yeah, slow motion is a special effect in camera special effect.

Yeah, or fast motion, too, which is 10 times more hilarious than fast motion, if you ask me. Where would the Monsters be without fast motion? Yeah.

Or Benny Hill, for God's sakes. Sure. That lived and breathed on fast motion. What else can you do But you can, and we'll see this in some of the early special effects, stopping the film, changing something, starting it again. Right.

Like bewitched, appearing out of nowhere.

Yeah. That's an in-camera special effect. Yeah.

One thing that struck me about all this from researching this is how the basis, the foundation for special effects was laid immediately upon motion pictures being created. Like the whole industry, not even the industry, Before the industry existed, but basically after the invention of motion pictures, and that it stayed virtually the same until the '90s. Yeah. People refined it and got better at it and techniques got more-The same general crafts were used. Very much so.

Which is why craft service is called craft service. Oh, yeah. Because each department is their own craft.

Oh, I didn't know that.

They're there to serve them pizza rolls.

Yeah, man. Or whatever. You can put on some weight filming something. I'll I can't get that first.Yeah, you can.Oh, my God.

Stop motion animation, that is an in-camera effect. You're moving a little clay figure or whatever, a doll or a King Kong.

A raisin?

A California raisin, one frame at a time, 24 frames per second.

Can you imagine? Didn't you do that with your brother, with GI Joe?

I did. Then years later, I did a little Star Wars thing when I got a high eight video camera and spent three days working on something that ended up being nine seconds long. I said, I'm What's funny is you're going to get a cease and desist later from Lucasfilm after talking about us in the podcast. I might. Then we have postproduction effects, and that is, I think that's what a lot of people think of as special effects these days. Really? Because that's all the CGI stuff that you will see as all happens in postproduction.

Okay, all right. Yes, these days, I got you. Almost all special effects happens in post these days, right?

Well, no, they still combine some of the old crafts as well. But yeah, surely a lot of it is CGI.

I mean, computers can do some amazing stuff. They can. I mean, stuff that used to take months to do, a computer can do in hours now and do it a million times better. Yeah. So depending on your taste, I should say. That's right. Those are the big three, practical in camera and postproduction. And like I was saying, the basis of special effects was founded in the 19th century. There There were just some people who had followed in a tradition of still photography. Still photographers by that time had already figured out some cool stuff that you could do messing around with cameras, something like double exposure, where you take a picture of one thing and then take a picture of another thing with the previously exposed film, and all of a sudden it looks like there's a ghost looming behind you. That's right. Stuff like that. So out of the gate, when motion pictures started to become a little widespread and people could afford them and try messing around with them, they had a basis of trickery to begin with. But there's a lot of stuff you can do with motion picture cameras that you can't do with still photo cameras.

And they figured this out right away.

Yeah, that first guy who's credited as the first special effect is Alfred Clarke. They don't have the year exactly right. It's either '93, that's 1893 or 1895. He made a short film called The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. And he did that little a stop trick. Like I was saying, you shoot something, you stop the camera, you replace it or you remove something, and then you start the camera. And in real-time, when you go to play it back, it's seamless. And in his case, did you look at it?

No, I didn't see that one.

He uses a stop trick with Mary getting beheaded. Right when the ax is going to fall, he switches her out for a dummy, then starts the camera back up and he chops the dummy's head off. And it looks pretty good. We can't... There's no big weird jump. For 1893, he did a really good job.

Yeah, and the key to that is just making sure that no one touches the camera or even breathes on it. Don't move. And then getting the dummy in the same position as the actor.

Yeah, and in fact, as we'll talk about later with Matt paintings, it's so crucial that the camera not move. One technique was they used to bury the camera tripod a couple of feet into the Earth just to make sure no dumb, dumb dumb PA bumps into it like me. That happens.

Alfred Clarke is credited with the first special effect, but a guy named Georges Meilhies. Did I get it, Meilhies?

We should go ask Casey Pegram.

Oh, yeah, he would know.

I think it's Millier.

Oh, nice. I think he just nailed it. Georges Millier. At any rate, this guy is known as the father of special effects. He was very early on doing stuff that no one else was doing. Granted, there were very few people working in this field at the time.

None of the five people did.

But he was an illusionist, and he said, Oh, man, I can really do some amazing tricks with this camera. And he really put it to good use from a very early, I mean, turn of the last century.

Yeah, he actually stumbled upon that little stop trick by accident when he was shooting a street traffic scene in Paris. In 1896, the camera jams while I think a bus was coming across frame. He's like, mad, fixes the camera. Can we say that?

Sure.

All right.

We don't have any French people listening to it.

Yeah, that's true. Starts the camera back up, and of course, there's different things happening. Then when he went back to look at it, he just stumbled upon this weird little substitution splice that became part of filmmaking.

Yeah, because by the time the camera had started up again, the bus was replaced by a hearse. It looked like when he went back and watched it, the bus suddenly transformed into a hearse.

And he said, Wait till they get a load of bewitched 70 something years from now. Or no, I guess, what was that in the '50s? '60s.

'60s, all right. You may not recognize Georges Mellier's name. I think so. But you probably have heard of his work, like a Trip to the Moon. What's widely cited is one of the first actual movies. I think it was in the 20 something minute range. But it was about some explorers in the Victorian era getting in a rocket and traveling to the moon and the rocket lands in the man in the moon's eye. Everybody's seen that. I don't care who you are. If you say you haven't, you have. This was the guy who made that. And this is a very early movie. It was from 1902, but he was doing all sorts of amazing stuff. He was using extensive costuming, masks, all sorts of in-camera techniques.

He was painting on film frames?

Yeah, and this is 1902. Like I was saying, this stuff was refined, but it was the basis of special effects for the next century to come.

Should we take a quick break?

I think so.

All right, let's take a quick break. We will talk a little bit about the mat technique right after this.

I'm actually pretty psyched about this.

I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

My best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them. Wow. Thank God for the living system. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive.

It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So how did we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents family therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

The iHeartPodcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh, hi. I'm Rachael Zoh, and I'm back for another season of my podcast, Climbing in Heels. You might know me from the Rachael Zoh Project, or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business. My podcast, Climbing in Heels, is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women, and this season, we're taking things up a notch. I'll be talking to some incredible women across so many industries, from models and beauty industry stars to doctors, entrepreneurs, and TV personalities. Climbing in Heels is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamor, inspiration, and fun. Every week, listeners will be able to ask me any questions. I'm answering it all. My life is absolutely crazy with so much going on, and I'm so beyond excited to bring you along for the ride. Whether we're talking red carpet looks, current trends, or products I'm obsessed with, I'm here to be your fashion fairy godmother. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

All Sorry, Chuck. As I said, I'm very psyched about the mat.

Yeah. This is a little confusing the way it's laid out here. Okay. Because what Ed is talking about here with Norman Dawn on is called original negative mat painting. If you hear of a mat painting, that is a piece of glass where you have, and I'm going to talk about the most common way you might see it employed, is you take a big piece of glass and you paint a cityscape on it, like really realistic. Then you put that in a scene and shoot it. Instead of having someone in front of a city, and this was pre-blue screen and green screen technology, you would just put Kurt Russell in Escaped from New York in a field, and there's a map painting of New York City behind him, and it looks great. And James Cameron painted that in Escape from New York. He was a map painter.

Oh, I didn't know that.

That was like his First job.

It's neat. Even if you do know what Chuck's talking about, go to the Internet and just look up great map paintings. It's amazing. There's a lot of really wonderful ones, one you've seen before, ones you haven't. But basically, any time you've seen a movie pre- 1993, maybe 1990, where somebody walks into this enormous place or this amazingly elaborate future city or something like that, what you're actually looking at is an expertly painted painting that has been messed with in post-production or using an in-camera technique to make it look like it's alive or actually bustling or energetic. Or there. But it's a painting. It's a painting that some amazing human being painted by hand.

Yeah, and we should point out, they still do this today. They just do it digitally. And digital matte painters are super talented as well. Sure. But it's neat to think about that old craft and James Cameron painting a piece of glass and sticking that behind Kurt Russell.

And I mean, it was used in everything. For my money, matte painting is the single most important and widespread special effect ever.

Maybe hard to argue that.

Thank you. It was in Mary Poppins. When Mary Poppins is coming into the city of London. Floating down. That's a map painting. When Superman walks into the... What's the name of the place where he's from? Like the Crystal Cave?

Fortress of Solitude? Yeah.

Is that where he talks with Marlon Brando, his dad?

Yeah, I think so. Okay.

That's a map painting.

I think the Fortress of Solitude are the remnants of Krypton. Okay. And boy, Superman people are so at me right now.

Are there Superman people still? I thought everybody was on the Marvel train.

No, people love Superman. Really? The comics.

Okay. Because I was going to say, you've seen what they've done as Superman lately, right? And Batman? Yeah.

So that's the map painting. And what that is, it's called set extension. So that basically means you're just extending the real life set to make something bigger and more opulent. Got you. Or maybe not more opulent, just bigger and more. Right. But here's the thing, relying on that mat painter and having the glass there, and glass can break, and it can onset with lighting can be weird. So that all can get a little hinky. So that's why this technique called original negative mat painting was developed by Norman Dawn. And that is when... Nowadays, they'll use what's called the mat box, which is literally like black. I don't think it's cardboard these days, but whatever they make out of. A cardboard thing you put over the lens to block out whatever you want to block out. Back in the day, they would paint cardboard and hold it in front of the lens, or they would actually paint the lens. And what you're essentially doing is painting away. It was early green screen. You're painting away what you don't want in the frame or what you want in the future, and then adding that later on.

Right. And because it's black or because it's covered, the light is not hitting that part of the film. That part of the film, the actual film strip itself that you're recording onto or filming onto, that's unexposed. All that gets exposed is the part of the lens or the camera that is not covered, that has, say, your actor doing the Herky-jerky dance. Right? And then so what you do after that is you take that film that has your actor doing the herky-jerky dance, project it onto a screen so you see where the actor is. And on this screen, you literally paint the background that you want, then you film the whole thing a second time, and now you have your actor in the set that you originally wanted.

Right. The only difference there, which is something that wasn't quite right here, is they don't project it. They just develop a few frames of it and project it like a slide. Got you. So it's not like the camera, the film is moving through on the wall. Because in the article here, it says, And then you just stop it. And what happens if you do that is the the bulb burns the film. Okay.

So you can't just stop a movie projector. You produce a slide of it and project that.

Yeah. And then you paint in the castle or the mountain or the whatever you want, and then you go back and expose it again. Pretty neat.

You just open your trench coat. There you go.

And the big innovator with the original negative map painting was Norman Dawn, and he really led the way.

But I mean, again, most of the stuff that does this now is done by computers in post. But this is like the links people were going to to make movies at the time. And you watch them today and you're like, God, it looks terrible. But if you stop and think about the effort that they were going to.They.

Were inventing techniques. To create this.

Yeah. It's just mind boggling that they managed to get it to this point.

Yeah. Norman Dawn tried to patent that technique as well, but they said, no, you did not invent this. You popularized it, and you can't patent something that you made super popular. Yeah.

There's some other stuff, too. There's like, rear projection and front projection, which is basically like projecting the background, a moving background onto a screen behind the actors. Basically, all those hokey driving scenes where the person's great. The car is being rocked or whatever, the road behind them, that's front or rear projection.

Yeah. People still will use that as homage, like in Pulp Fiction, very famously, Bruce Willis, or I guess not. When Bruce Willis gets in the cab after the fight. If it looks old fashioned, that's because QT used rear screen projection for that. There's also a technique that's not in here that I just remembered. I'm actually having to look up what it's called. When you're in a car scene, but you're not doing your rear screen projection. So what happens here is you're sitting in a car in a still car on the set, but they're not projecting anything behind you. What you've got is two people shaking the car out of frame.

Where are they, grips?

Yeah, usually a grip. But I've shaken cars and trains before. It's because I'm just a body on the set. I got you. Get in there and shake that thing. In fact, one job I was on, there was a fake subway train and the hydraulics broke early on. And they were like, Bring out the PAs, you're going to shake this train for 12 hours. They're like, You got rhythm?

Get in there.

Yeah. Oh, we couldn't have too much rhythm because we got yelled at for that because it looked too rhythmic. Got you. So we were like, I don't know how to do this.

Who are you working for?

It was just a commercial director. Got you. That said that our movement of the train looked too rhythmic and not believable. All right. So anyway.

This Fruit of the Looms commercial is totally unbelievable.

You sit in the car, you're acting like you're driving. There's someone else shaking the car. There might be someone else off camera, flashing a light through the car, like you're going by a street light or a headlight goes across their face, and there may be fake rain in the background. And this is sometimes six, seven, eight people working in concert to make it look like you're driving at night in the rain or something like that.

It's really neat. So there's not an obvious background, trees, a road or whatever, but maybe there's headlights coming up behind you. It's just dark.

Yeah, but they're people with a spotlight. It's really, really cool. Old fashioned, but people still use that stuff. And I wish you could remember the full name of that technique.

The Shaken Shimmy.

I'm going to be so mad later on.

We'll just call it the Shaken Schimmy, okay? That's right. So you talked about green screen, and that's actually super old, too. There's a really convoluted explanation about how originally green screen employed sodium vapor lights, which would actually mess with the yellow exposure on panchromatic film. And my brain, I started bleeding out of my ear. I cannot tell you how many times I read descriptions about this, and I can't quite get it. So suffice to say that that was one technique for green screen. What really changed the industry is when they figured out that, again, if you film in black, the film is not going to be exposed. Anything you go and re-expose it to, it will cover over that stuff. So it's transparent. So for example, in The Invisible Man from, I think, 1933?

1933, yeah.

Claude Rains wore a black bodysuit. And the background was black. It was a black screen, like a black green screen. But he wore clothes and everything and bandages and sunglasses. I think he smoked a cigarette or whatever. But when he took the bandages off, we took his sunglasses and clothes off, there was nothing there. It was a black bodysuit and a black background. So when they filmed the background later on, all you could see was the background and the clothes and the bandages. It looked like there was nothing there because as far as the film was concerned, when they were filming it, there wasn't anything there. So the film wasn't exposed in those sections on each frame.

That's right. And that's called the Williams process. And a key part of the Williams process is the optical printer. And that is a projector that actually prints an image directly onto the film that runs through the camera while that printer and camera are synced up.

Yes. So this is, to me, the optical printer is the second most widespread and useful special effect technique in the history of film.

You just waved your hand.

I did. I suddenly had an askot and a beret on.

Yeah, hard to argue that, too. But all this stuff was just precursor to what was blue screen early on, chroma key blue, and then later became chroma key green. I'm not sure why they made the switch, actually. I don't either. Other than maybe the green-Less prevalent or less used? I think so, probably. Maybe the blue was... Because you know what? You don't want anything close to that color will disappear against the green screen.

Anyone who's ever done the weather on the newscast can tell you that.

Yeah, there are blooper reels of weather people disappearing when they wear a green jacket or something.

It looks like the weather is going on through their body. Same thing. I want to say one more thing about optical printers or another little bit about it. Sure. So what you have is a projector, projecting a film on to a screen, and you have a camera recording what's being projected, right? That's right. That's the optical printer. And you could do all sorts of stuff with that. So let's say you have a shot where you have one mat in the foreground and live actor, and then another mat in the background that has a bunch of different people in it or something like that.

Or stormtroopers.

Okay. So you got three different elements to that shot. What you would do is using the same film, film each thing. So you go film that like the actor, the live-action actor. You got that on the film and you project that and you take where you're filming the mat and you project that and film that. I just totally have screwed this up. Oh, my God. This is just like...

The sun?

No, it's worse than that. Was it false positives? Do you remember that time where I was like, I took a pretty simple thing and just completely walked the dog with it? Yeah. Okay. Well, I just did that again. Everyone, I want you to go look up optical printers, read a little bit about them, And then you'll say, Oh, Josh is right.

Yeah, this is tough stuff.

It is. Essentially, you're filming a projection, and you can do that multiple times with the same film, and it adds up to where you have the shot you wanted, where it makes it look like all these things that you filmed three separate times are all happening together in one space.

Yes, you are marrying separate images together onto a single piece of film. Right.

You couldn't do that before optical printers, which is a projector and a camera working Working together.

That's right. Okay.

I think. I needed that.

We should mention briefly, motion control cameras. This is a system that allows... It's basically taking the person out of the equation. There is not a person pushing a dolly. There's not a person moving the camera. It is a machine that is programmed to move a camera through space very, very precisely and exactly the same every single time.

Yeah. So you can do the exact same motion over and over again.

Over and over. And a lot of times, if you're on a TV commercial, as boring as that is, you will see stuff like this for a food shoot because food shoots are notoriously tricky because everything's super close up and has to be perfect. And you can't be off a little bit with the camera because a lot of times you'll sub in stuff later in post. And that's the whole reason for a motion control is to replicate moves with exact precision.

So I was reading about industrial light and magic using this to really great effect with the first Star Wars, which is episode 4, right? The New Hope. That's the first one, right?

I'm not confirming or denying anything. I'm just going to let that stand.

Episode four is the first Star Wars movie that ever came out, correct?

The Star Wars: A New Hope is the first episode that I ever saw in a movie theater.

Because it's the first one that ever came out. Anyway, when they were making this, is it a Star destroyer? The big The Big Daddy ships? Okay. Oh, man, we're going to get murdered. Everything, all of the ships in Star Wars were models. Yes. Fairly small models, actually. They weren't the biggest. You got that part, right? Okay.

I think it was episode four.

I'm almost positive. Okay. Those models were not moving in these shots, in these enormous, huge panoramic shots where there's Thai fighters flying around, shooting everything, and X-wing fighters shooting the tie fighters. None of those models were moving. What happened was they figured out how to use motion control cameras so that the camera would go through the shot and around the model and make it look like the model was moving. And plus it was moving the shot through space, Right? Right. The thing is, let's say you have five different ships. You film those five ships separately, but those five ships are all going to be in the same shot. So you have to film that same shot the exact same way five different times, and then run it through an optical printer so that you can get all of them, all five shots onto the same strip of film. But that's one of the ways that motion control cameras were really put to good use, and it was extremely ground-breaking because not one of those ships were moving in reality when they were filming Star Wars.

Can you name five Star Wars ships?

Tye fighter, X-wing fighter.

You already said one. You were right.

The Tye fighter, two. The deuce is what the people in the know call it. Sure.

You already said Star destroyer.

You should use that. So Star destroyer was right?

Yeah, there's a Star destroyer.

Okay. You made a face like I was just totally off. You could make the case that Endor was a ship, even though it was a planet. There was the Forest Spider, the pod racer.

Yeah.

And Dr. Zayas.

That's right. He's the final ship. Yeah. Do you know how many people-Oh, boy.

Their calf muscles just popped right out of the back to their legs.

Holly Frey is hyperventilating somewhere in the office, and she doesn't know why. So as I said earlier, it's usually a combination of these different techniques to create one overall special effect using these different crafts. And a great example is Jurassic Park in the scene with the Veloceraptors in the Kitchen. That great, great sequence when it was playing cat and mouse with those children. There were puppets, there were actors in costumes, there were animatronic raptor heads, and there were full CGI raptors. You throw this all in a hat, mix it all up, and it comes out to be a really believable-looking scene.

Yeah, it comes out as an Oscar.

Yeah, I'm sure they won Oscars, right?

They had to have. I don't know, but there's just no way.

It was groundbreaking. I remember being just gobsmacked in the movie theater when I first saw those dinosaurs walking across the screen.

That was 1993, I believe, for the first Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park, A New Hope, the first one that came out. But that was five years after the first Oscar had been awarded for special effects as far as I know. Oh, really? I believe that The Abyss was the first one to win an Oscar for special effects, maybe. No, I'm sorry. I'm way off. The Abyss was the first movie to win a special effect for a CGI effect. Remember the water? Sure.

Still looks pretty good.

It looks amazing. This is 1987 we're talking about. Wow. Was that when that came out? Yeah, I was surprised to see that, too, because I thought it was... It holds up. Yeah. It's a good movie.

I really like that movie.

How do you not like Ed Harris? You don't like Ed Harris? What did you not like Ed Harris?

No, I like him as an actor. I think a lot of people might have problems with Ed Harris as a person. He's notoriously cantankerous.

I've never heard that. I believe it. Sure.

He looks like he could yell somebody down, doesn't he? Sure.

But he also keeps a cool head when he's an actor as a '70s or '60s NASA guy.

Hey, I love Ed Harris. All right, let's take another break.

Okay.

We're going to come back and talk a little bit about Star Wars episode, whatever, right after this.

I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

In my best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them. Thank God for the living system. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive, it just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So, how did we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Ihart podcast update this week on your free IHart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two, Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odias, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, we're back, and we should talk... We should mention the garbage mat real quick. Okay. Because that is a big deal. A lot of times you have wirework or you have things hanging from wires. It doesn't have to be a person. It can be like a model plane or a tie fighter or whatever. Sure. You got to get rid of those wires.

Unless you're at wood.

You can't have fish in line.

No, you're supposed to not, but yes.

Or if you're Charlie Theron in Mad Max: Furry Road, you got to get rid of that arm. Or if you're in Forrest Gump, you got to get rid of Lieutenant Dan's legs.

Man, that was amazing. That was the first time anybody's ever done really something like that throughout.

Yeah, I have my problems with that movie for sure. And one of them is, I think he way over... He was like a kid in a candy store and way overdid the like, And now Forrest is in the White House and using archival footage and sticking Forest in it.

Yeah, that whole half hour dialog he has with Peter Cushing's Ghost. It was uncanny.

But I get it. I get why these filmmakers get excited. These really technical Wizards, when they get a new technique and they just hammer it.

The guy from Industrial Light and Magic, when they made the first Star Wars, call it what you will, his name was, I think, John Dykstra. This motion-controlled camera assembly that they created was called Dykstra Flex. It was super ground-breaking, and they really did amazing stuff with it. Well, he's a legend in this industry now. I saw an interview with him recently, and he was like, I'm so tired of seeing just whole cities leveled and just the most amazing stuff you can possibly think of being done just because we can do it. He put it really, really well, I think. It's an embarrassment of riches. Yeah, totally. It It can be done, so it's being done. Everybody's doing it. It makes it less amazing. Not necessarily because it looks bad. It just keeps looking better and better every time. If you look at Charlie's Theran's prosthetic arm or missing arm compared with Lieutenant Dan's missing legs.

Looks radically different.

It does. So it's getting better. There's just too much of it, I think, is the point. No, I'm with you. Just to be all Ed Heresy on this.

No, I have long predicted a return to practical effects. Really? And it's starting to happen a little bit more and more.

Yeah, I could see starting with indie filmmakers. Yeah, for sure. Which is funny because finally, computer generated effects have trickled down enough. You or I could just walk out of the studio and probably get on any one of those backs out there and use stuff that 10, 15 years ago would have cost $500,000 to set up a rig like that.

Yeah, and that's how some young filmmakers have gotten noticed is by making these short films with zero money on their computer that get a lot of action on YouTube because it looks so amazing. And the studio will be like, Sign that person up. I can't remember the guy's name, but that's happened a couple of times in recent years.

The Ed Harris.

We should talk about a few of the ground-breaking people over the years. Oh, yes. We'll go through these a little quicker than what we have in front of us, I think. But we should mention Lon Cheney. Sure. One of the original superstars of film in the silent era, The Man of a Thousand Faces. He was very talented doing his own makeup and changing his face. That's why he's called The Man of a Thousand Faces.

He's like, Here's 997.

What about Willis O'Brien?

He was one of the pioneers of stop motion photography. Again, if you're a California Raisens fan, you have a lot to thank Willis O'Brien for. He also Dude, the stuff he did. I mean, if you look back, he did King Kong, the 1933 King Kong. And if you look back at this, you're like, this is cool. But if you research what was done to create this, you're just blown away by it.

Yeah, again, many processes coming together to create that 1933 version of King Kong. And that fight looks good still. I mean, it doesn't look realistic, but consider the year, it looks awesome.

It does. And it's about three, three and a half minutes long, King Kong fighting the tyrannisaurus rex. But it took seven weeks to film because there's 24 frames shot per second in a film. That's right. And for every frame, they moved the models a little bit here or there. That's why it took seven weeks just for that fight scene. I think it was 55 weeks for all of the stop motion photography that was done in that movie.

Yeah, that's impressive.

It really is impressive, especially when you realize the trouble they went to when you go back and watch it. This is pretty nuts.

Yeah, Ray Harryhausen continued the work of Willis O'Brien and very famously in the '50s and '60s with movies like Jason and the Argonauts.

And Clash of the Titans. Yeah. Remember Medusa? Sure. Scary lady.

Yeah, that had to be toward the end of his career, I guess, because that was in the '80s.

Yeah, I think like '81, maybe. Remember the Minitar, too, man?

That was a cool movie. That was a big movie for me as a kid.

Yeah, and I was like, when LA law came along, I was like, I know that guy. That's right. There's the Titans guy.

We should shout out Millicent Patrick. This is a very interesting story. She was one of the only, well, first and only women working in special effects back in the day. She created the very famous mask of the Gill Man, from Creature from the Black Lagoon in the mid 1950s, and was unceremoniously fired.

Not just fired, stricken from the credits.

Yeah, this guy named Bud Westmore, he assisted her and then basically had her fired rather than give her the credit for the mask, which he would take credit for.

Because I think he was the supervisor in charge of effects or costume or something.

Oh, I thought, I guess he assisted her, but he was her boss? Yeah.

Okay. But she very clearly on her own came up with the Gill Man for the creature from the Black World.

This has only come out in the last few years. They dug up the original stuff. Yeah, sexism just Basically pushed her out of the industry altogether.

Very sad. She's starting to get her due now, though, which is good.

Yeah, that is very good.

There's Dick Smith is amazing.

He created the Squibb. Oh, really? Yeah.

He's a very famous makeup artist. He's really good at making people look aged.

Yeah, he made a 47-year-old Marlon Brando look much older than the godfather. Oh, yeah? Yeah. He was a year younger than me. That's crazy.

I never thought about that. Isn't that nuts? Wow, he really is good. He also did Death Becomes Her, which is one of the all-time great movies.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And The Exorcist and Scanners.

And have you ever seen Ghost Story from 1981? Oh, yeah. Very scary movie. The Old Dudes? He did that.

What else? Very famously aged Dustin Hoffman and Little Big Man by many, many years. Sure. And then in the last 25, 30 years, Rick Baker and Stan Winston.

Stan Winston got my vote.

Yeah. I mean, these two guys were both just creative leaders in the industry and Trailblazers in the industry. And as Ed says in here, mentored a generation of special effects employees. Employees? Creators? Artists?

Sure. All three of those work. Lord. Gig workers?

Rick Baker, American Wereholfe in London in 1981, which still holds up. The Thriller video in 1983, Star Wars, Mos Iisley Cantina. He made all those.

Yeah. Did you know that about the Mos Iisley Cantina? Sure. I didn't know that. He was almost single-handedly responsible for all of them.

Then Stan Winston, you got to talk about movies like The Thing and Predator and Terminator, and they both have set up foundations and schools and things like that.

Stan Winston also did the make up for what I think is maybe the best slasher film of all time, Friday the 13th Part Two.

Yeah, Two is when Jason comes along, right?

Yes, it's Jason. Before he got his mask, he gets his mask in three. I think the Friday the 13th franchise is as good as it gets for horror movies.

I dropped off at a certain point. Did you see all those?

No, I still haven't seen all of them, but even just putting the first five or six up. Yeah. I think it's like watching them again as an adult. I'm like, these are really good- Yeah, scary. Slasher films, even better than I remember from being a kid. Yeah. The reason Stan Winston filled in for Friday 13th part 2 is because the guy who did Friday 13th, the first one, Tom Savini, was unavailable. He was off doing creep show, I believe. Tom Savini is another legend.

I think they're redoing creep show.

Are they? Mm-hmm. Okay, I'd watch that.Different.

Stories.oh.

Even better.I.

Think, if I'm not mistaken.Nice. But yes, Savini is well known for being the godfather of gore.

Yeah, he did Maniac. Did you ever see that? Yeah. That was an off-the-rocker movie.

Then these days, there are companies, ILM and Weta. Ilm, Industrial Light Magic is Lucas' company. And they're cool because they invented this stuff because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done. And he was like, Go figure out how to do it. And they did.

They really did.

And then Weta is Peter Jackson's company. Oh, okay. And he's the one that has really pioneered the mocap, the motion capture techniques.

Where a person is wearing a suit, and the suit has a bunch of different almost ping-pong balls all over it. Like joints and crucial places where the body moves. The actor, stunt person or dancer, whoever wearing this suit, goes through the motions. And then-They're just going through the motions.

Sure.

And those motions, what's captured is fed into a computer, and the computer generates a character doing all those same motions, creating the performance. But it's a computer generated character. Character.

Yeah, I don't think he was the first, but the Golem character in those Lord of the Rings movies was really one of the first really terrific-looking, fully CGI character.

Yeah, I found, from what I could tell, the first full CGI character ever in a movie. You want to guess? You'll never guess.

Well, I mean, it's touted as Indiana Jones in the Last crusade.

Wrong.

Really?

What is it going to be? It's another Spielberg movie. Okay. It's Young Sherlock Holmes. Do you remember the stained glass night that comes to life and tries to slash one of them with his sword? First full CGI character in a movie.

Well, why?

I don't know. But that's what I could find, and that one's from 1985.

Well, it says maybe it's in the nitpicky language because in the Last crusade, when Walter Donovan's face melts and turns to dust when he drinks from the Chalice.

That's That's in Riders of the Lost Ark, isn't it? Oh, no, you're right. I'm sorry. Last Crucade. Okay, yeah.

It says here, It was the first ever digital composite of a full-screen live-action image.

There's something in the language there.

Yeah, like maybe it wasn't full-screen or something.

This was the first CGI. But it wasn't the first CGI image. This was the first moving CGI image. The first CGI image was in Looker. Remember that movie?

I totally saw Looker. That was a big HBO movie for me. For sure.

Same here. It was Looker, Runaway, Crawl.

Runaway is Tom Selleck.

Yeah, and Jean Simmons is the bad guy.

That's right. I saw Crawl a lot, too. Looker had Albert Finney, right? If I remember correctly.

Albert Finney and Susan Day. Yeah, Susan Day. It was written by Michael Crichton, I think.

That was the first full body 3D human, but it did not move. It was static. Yeah. And the very first computer generated effects period funny enough, were used to replicate computer screens. So whenever you would see a computer screen in Westworld or Aliens or Star Wars, and they were like, what is the computer going to look like? Not now. That was the first time they used computer-generated imaging was to make a fake computer screen.

And the first full CGI scene ever done was in The Wrath of Khan, which I believe came out in 1982. But there's a genesis, like Earth being cooling and turning into the Earth, and there's these amazing shots around it. That's all CGI, and that was the first one. And Tron. Oh, yeah. I thought for sure Tron would have been among the first. Apparently, most of that was animated by humans, not computers.

That's right.

All the glowing lines, all that stuff, animated, which makes it nuts that they were able to create that. Yeah.

Now, the big thing is this deaging technique that they're getting better and better.

Yeah, they really are.

Yeah. So the new Scorsese pick, the Irishman, I think deages, and it has taken a long time to get out because the deaging didn't look good enough for Scorsese. So they have deaged De Nero. And then I saw this new Ang Lee movie, Gemini Man, where Will Smith of now, he plays an assassin, and he has to go kill his younger self.

Looper?

Yeah, like Looper, I guess. But this Gemini Man script has been in development for 25 years with various people attached, but they could never do it.

Because the technology was not there.

Yeah, it's finally here. But here's the thing I didn't know. I've seen this trailer, and I'm like, Man, that deaging looks great. They didn't deage him. It is a fully CGI Will Smith.

When it looks that realistic.

The younger version is, yeah. Wow. Because I was like, Man, they're getting so good at the deaging. That's amazing. So he mocapped his whole performance, motion captured, and they just used fresh prints, photos.

Man, they just basically deepfaked him.

Sort of.

It's a Prince photo.

Have you seen the Bill Hater deepfake that's going around now? Yes. That's pretty cool. Because he goes from Hater to Tom Cruise to Seth Rogan, back to Tom Cruise. It's all over the place.

It's really creepy. It's really well done.

Then, like we said, they use CGI for so many movies, little mistakes that can be corrected, little things that it's just much cheaper to add digitally later on. It could be a movie that, like I said, looks like it has no CGI whatsoever, and it's cheaper to put a plate of food in the background digitally than cook the food and put it on set. That's a bad example. Or you can color grade a movie. You completely change the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Has that yellow hue for everything. All that stuff is green. They're in the deep south in the summertime.

They used to have to film it at some weird exposure and then project it at another exposure with some filter and then record the whole thing on an optical negative. Yeah. Now, they can just do it all with the computer easy peasy. It's great.

The other thing I'm looking around, but this is like one eighth of this topic. Yeah.

Hopefully it made you appreciate movies more. Yeah. You, specifically.

Me?

I'm just kidding. I know you love the movies. Sure. If you want to know more about movies, go listen to Chuck's podcast, Movie Crush. You'll love it. Hey, thanks. And since I said movie crush, it's time for a listener mail.

Actually, since you said movie crush, we're about to release an episode on The Matrix. Oh, yeah. Hadn't seen that movie. It's been 20 years since it came out.

You've never seen The Matrix?

No, I hadn't seen it in a long time.

I got you.

But I didn't realize this is the 20-year anniversary. Watched it last night. Still totally holds up.

Really?

Looks great. Fun. Yeah. Well-acted by most of the cast members.

Who didn't act well?

Oh, you know, Keanu always gets I picked on. I love that guy. I know, kung fu. He's perfect in that role, though.

Yeah, he's great. I can't imagine anybody else in it. It'd be just too serious, I think. Imagine Tom Cruise in the matrix. Yeah, you're right.

He adds a little like something light, doesn't he?

Yeah, it makes it a little more every man, almost a little more believable in a weird way. I think so.

Have you seen those John Wick movies?

I've seen some of it. It's just a little too video gamey for me. But it's fine. I respect that people like it. Sure.

Here we go. This is about 3D. 3d? It's about solar panels. I got movies on the- Where did you get 3D? Well, they are in 3D, I guess. Okay. I got movies on the brain. Hey, guys, Being a roofer my entire life, I never thought I'd have much input until now. It's my time to shine. One thing that wasn't mentioned in the solar panel episode is that people really need to consider the age of their existing roof before installing solar panels.

That's a good point.

A new residential single roof should It lasts about 30 years. But if the roof isn't nearly new, I would not suggest installing solar panels.

Definitely don't install it if the roof is on fire.

Once the panels are installed, roof repairs or replacement is very difficult and much more expensive. If the life of the roof ends before the solar panels die, you can easily add 50 to 75% or more to the cost of the reroofing due to the added labor cost to remove and reinstall the panels. What a nightmare. Yeah, I think about that. You should align it, ideally, with your new roof.

Sure.

I do mostly commercial roofing, can't tell you the number of customers who I talk to had solar panels on an old roof and are now paying through the nose for repairs or replacement. Reputable solar panel specialists should have this roof conversation with a potential customer before installing the panels. I'm afraid it doesn't always happen or customers underestimate the added reroofing cost once they're installed.

Man, this is a It's a PSA.

It is. Thanks again for what you guys do. I'm in my truck a lot driving to different job sites, and it's always easier on Tuesday through Thursday when I have a new stuff you should know. That is from Owen Sincinig.

Great name. First and last. Yeah. Love the name Owen. Stephen King's kid's name. Owen? Yeah.

Owen King.

Thanks a lot, Owen. We appreciate that big time. That was a great email. I would have never thought about that.

He didn't even send his business in to be plugged. So just Google his name and roofing, and if he happens to live near you, use him.

That's how dedicated this guy is.

He sounds honest.

Well, if you want to be a cool person like Owen, you can get in touch with us. You can go on to stuffyeshouldknow. Com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The Black Effect presents Family Therapy, and I'm your host, Elia Connie. Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co-parenting two young boys with her former partner, David.

David, he is a leader. He just don't want to leave me. But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship?

What's the blueprint? David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to Family Therapy on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Iheartpodcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tong Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh, hi. I'm Rachael Zoh, and my podcast Climbing in Heels is back and better than ever. You might know me from the Rachael Zoh Project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business. Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women, and this season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamor, inspiration, and fun. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.