Segement Title: The MaskPlot SummarySome guy gets a mask and then is able to do magical(cartoony) things.The Effects1. Deep Pockets Effect Cops keep pulling things out of The Mask's pockets that couldn't possibly fit.  2. Tornado Effect When the mask is transforming, he turns into a swirling tornado, much like the tazmanian devil. The environment is affected by the wind created by the tornado as well as being moved when the tornado bumps into objects.  3. Stretching Effect When the mask moves quickly, sometimes parts of his body are stretched out.    4. Speed-up Effect In one scene, the mask makes balloon animals. He does this really quickly, like a cartoon character would. His hands are moving very quickly, but the rest of the shot (his body, the other actors in the background) are not moving quickly.  How We Think it Was Done1. Deep Pockets EffectOne way to do this would be to cut out the pockets of the pants, and put a bunch of things in his big baggy pants. If there wasn't enough room for everything, you could cut to a different shot, put more stuff in his pants, and cut back. You could even "freeze frame" the shot, add stuff to his pants and then continue the shot. This could cause slight jumps in the film, however. 2. Tornado Effect Basically, this is adding cg to a shot like we did in ps2. The camera was probably calibrated to each specific shot, and then the cg actor was added and animated in the scene. 3. Stretching Effect The parts of the body were modelled and inserted into the scene. The stretching effect is cg. 4. Speed-up Effect There seem to be two ways to do this. In our last critique we looked at cartoonie running where the legs were cg and were composited with a layer containing the actor's upper body which was sped-up live action footage and a background layer of footage running at normal speed. A similar thing could have been done in the Mask in order to achieve the effect where only the actor's hands are moving quickly while the rest of his body, the background, and other actors in the scene appear to be normal speed. Another option would be to simply have the actor keep the rest of his body still and have the other actors move slowly while the actor moves his hands quickly. This way the footage can be sped up through editing while still having some elements appear to be super-speed while others move at a normal pace. How It Was Actually Done1. Deep Pockets EffectThe shot is only from about the knees up, and people are actually underneath the actor, pushing props up through his chopped-off pants, one after another. 2. Tornado Effect We were mostly right about this effect, but the production company focused on subtleties that make the shot appear more real. For example, the camera shakes slightly at certain times to give the cg character a sense of mass. There is also a noticeable effect on certain things in the shots that are moved around from "wind." These subtleties were difficult to perfect and integrate with the cg, but it is that integration that makes the scene work. 3. Stretching Effect We aren't sure, but judging by the information we could find, almost all of the Mask's super-human effects were accomplished in cg. It appears that the stretching of his body through the frame was also cg with some motion blur incorporated. 4. Speed-up Effect We were close in that the scene consists of a single layer and then 'sped-up'. The camera's capture rate was adjusted to lower the frames captured per second, but then the frames per second played back was normal. Other elements in the scene which were not supposed to move at super-human speed simply stayed relatively still and slow moving during filming. Alternate Ways of Doing the Effect1. Deep Pockets EffectAside from the ways listed above in the "how we think it was done" section, you could make completely cg props. This could require more time and work on making the cg objects move correctly in the scene, but it is another possibility, especially for things like the bazooka and would enable things to pass through the pockets which would not actually fit through a hole that small by being 'squeezed' to fit while passing through. 2. Tornado Effect You could make an entirely cg shot by modelling the scenery as well as the character. However, it would be extremely difficult to get the cut to match the live action cuts around it. Other ideas to try are putting fans in the scenes to blow things around more, or using the taz tornado effect to cut through things, as taz is often known to do. 3. Stretching Effect One thing that might make this look better is, in the case of the arm, or leg stretching, have the real actor's hand, or foot in the scene, and have the leg or arm, which is hopefully a solid color (yellow or purple in this case), be cg. That way the important features, like wrinkles in someone's hands, still appear completely real and the solid colors can be stretched through cg, or complicated editing tricks and animation. 4. Speed-up Effect I think the simplest way of doing this is just speeding up that footage slightly using a time effect in premiere. How This Applies to Our Project1. Deep Pockets EffectWe have a few shots where actors will be pulling things out from thin air (silverware, signs, etc..), so it was good to see possible ways of doing this. We had considered modeling hte big sign in cg so that it could be large and yet be pulled from a pocket. Seeing the Mask's low budget but clever solution helped us think of a solution that would be less demanding of our time since our original idea would involve not only modeling and animation but motion tracking the actor's hand. Instead we have decided to occlude the sign behind some green poster, achieving the desired effect with much less effort. 2. Tornado Effect Many of our effects involve integrating live action and cg elements. It was important for us to see some of the methods the production company used to make the elements integrate well together in order to make the scene convincing. 3. Stretching Effect There is a shot of an actor falling in which we'd like to have his legs stretch as if they are falling before the rest of his body. 4. Speed-up Effect There will be some running in our project, which we would like to appear very cartoony, and very fast.
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