CREATING MELTING FILM FRAME EFFECT

[Guest kev5000]

I'm trying to create the effect of the film frame melting in the projector. Everyone has seen it. How can this effect be created.

 

Any suggestions

 

Thanks

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I digitally animated this a few months ago. There's a certain sequence of events; first the film tends to "pop" out of focus, then warp for a few seconds until it starts to blacken and eventually burn all the way through. From memory, I ended up with a layer for the "lamp" which became orange after it was "switched off," a layer for the unaffected image, a layer with variable pinching and softening matted onto that with a vignette, a layer for the black "crispy edges", various mattes for the hole and expanding areas of influence of the burned area, and of course for each of those, another two or three layers of additional detail, blending and matting to get things to look right.

 

The result was at best a fairly loose approximation, but it was probably the best you could do without just doing it and shooting it off the screen.

 

Phil

[Dominic Case]

Everyone has seen it.

Sounds like a good reason to think of something different.

[K Borowski]

I vote for just shooting it off the screen. I've (sadly) seen it happen a few time with some 8mm film footage I have, and nothing that anyone tries to digitally replicate comes close (yet). Just make a print of the footage you want to use and rephotograph it, preferably on reversal so you don't go through too many generations of loss. What format are you shooting on, BTW?

 

Regards.

~Karl Borowski