Adding Special Effects to Indie Films

Video Transcript

"Let's say you're doing, for your independent film, you're doing a sci-fi or a science fiction movie, and shooting mini-DV, and, let's say, you have a budget of a couple thousand dollars, you aren't going to be doing the next "Star Wars" movie or "Lord of the Rings" or something. So, if you have that in mind in your script, I don't think you're going to succeed in doing it. So, you're kind of writing with what's available to you. You're probably going to have some special effects. And with special effects, that's a whole other deal. Because if you have some elaborate make-up effects, somebody getting their throat ripped out, or something like that where you actually have to have an effects guy or somebody who knows how to do effects, doing it, that's going to take time. I mean, I've had instances where I had to get an actor prepared who had these welts all over his body and stuff, and it was just for a very brief scene, but it took them like three hours to put this make-up on. So, I was shooting, I had schedules, scenes before and after, but I really had forgotten that it was going to take so long to do these-do the make-up effects on him. So, you're just going to sit around waiting for these make-up guys. So, I would suggest that the days you have special effects, just do the special effects those days. Don't do anything else. Just, as with the difficult actors that you think you're going to lose or that is going to cause you problems, you hurry up and want to get it done with first. So, do all your special effects and everything that are live on the set or with the people. Do them all in a short amount of time so you can just kind of have it out of the way. Don't have to think about it. And then you can continue with the movie. But definitely keep it as controlled as possible, because if you do it during the production, a lot of stops and starts. But, as I said, just try to keep it as cohesive and within a short amount of time as possible, doing special effects. Post-production is a whole different thing. If you have, like, flying saucers and space effects and lasers and stuff need to be added later, that's a whole other thing that's after editing. So, and that takes time as well. You got to allow time, because for somebody to do-those effects are very time consuming. So, just be prepared for that. But, that's kind of the whole opposite thing."