The Making of

SPECIAL EFFECTS
Part 2 - Editing Tricks

We used a mixture of in-camera tricks and simple editing techiques to create flying ships, tazer effects, and big explosions. The movie was edited using Adobe Premiere 6.0 on a PC.

Unwanted hands and/or rods in the shot can sometimes be removed easily with composite editing. Using a still frame of the set called a plate, we can cover a portion of the screen blocking whatever we don't want seen.

Composite elements were added by first filming the elements in front of a solid color screen, chroma-green or black, whichever created the best contrast to the subject. When i couldn't film it that way, i had to cut out what i didn't want frame by frame, called rotoscoping. The elements were then added to the shot using chroma key editing or a black alpha matte.

This method was most effective when mixed with live action elements. Rotoscoped full-size explosions were added over puffs from the smoke machine to make the grenade and missile launcher effects.