Smallville Special Effects

[Chris Evans]

Hi, would anybody be able to help me. I have been a big fan of Smallville for like 2 years. I think the special effects in it are amazing. I was wondering if anyone could tell me where there are any tutorials on the internet that teaches you how to make the effects, such as heat vision, x-ray vision, flying etc. I know some of the companies that deals with the smallville effects but is there any tutorials from other people or sites.

Thankyou very much

Chris

[Glenn Chan]

Try http://www.fxguide.com/ for starters.

[Chris Evans]

Hi thanks for the reply. FXGuide.com is a great site, i was on it for hours. The only problem is unfortunately there are no tutorials or articles based on smallville. Would anyone be able to assist me further.

Thankyou very much for all your help.

Chris

[Keith Loh]

The problem Chris is that you are asking for pointers on what takes a lot of people signficant expertise to accomplish on a specific show. It's like driving up to a house, saying: "I love it! Someone recommend a book on building it!"

The other problem is that many of the effects on Smallville can be accomplished in different ways by a lot of methods that combine both on-set lighting, careful blocking by the director and then two or three levels of post-production. Heat vision, ray effects, all of this can be approached in many ways. It can be done in scratch in a number of 3D programs. Many compositing programs can do it using stock elements. One person's method is totally different from others depending on what is needed and how much time or budget is available.

If you want an idea of how complex this might be, check out any copy of "Cinefex" magazine.