Special Effects of the Past Sci-fi Movie-Predator

Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, the leader of a Covert-ops U.S. Special Forces Unit was ordered to assist CIA man George Dillon on a mission of rescuing the potential survivors of a helicopter, which was downed over a remote jungle in South America. What we’ll talk about in the following is the film “Predator” in 1987. It was another production of the 20^th century fox and directed by John Mctierman. This film produced by 20^th century fox proved that the big budget film could get great response from the audience.
 

For making this kind of film, the animator team needs some special effects which are used to make the movie look much more realistic. At that time, it was quite difficult to use special effects and apply them for filmmaking as well, while the team did a really good job that this film successfully ran through all over the world. Greenberg Associates created some optical effects of the film like the power of invisibility of the predator, the thermal vision, glowing blood and the electrical spark etc. In order to make the effects of invisibility, they used bright red suit to wear, as red is the farthest opposite both of the green of jungle and the blue of sky. Regarding to remove red and leave an empty area, they made use of Chorma Key techniques. They made these scenes through combining two shoots optically to make the jungle fill in the empty area.

With respect to the thermal vision, infrared film could not be used because it did not register in the range of body temperature wavelengths. The special effects team used inframetrics thermal video scanner to give good heat images of the objects and people. They use green liquid of glow sticks to achieve glowing blood, which was used by campers and mixed with personal lubricant. The animators made electrical spark with rotoscoped animation using white paper pin registered on portable light tables to black-and-white prints of the film frames. For the finished effects, they made the drawings be composited by the optical crew. 

In the 21^st century, the animators and the visual effects teams do a great job in making the actions based on the sci-fi films. They used some 3D techniques for making glowing blood, electrical spark, thermal vision, actions etc. In order to achieve these action scenes, the animator’s team was trying to make these scenes appear naturally instead of using the traditional pan-follow camera sequences.  Now they follow some camera rule to shoot action and create the invisible power. They also use some pre-visualization to shoot the live action sequences.

In 1980s, the 20^th century fox movie production tried their best to deliver different types of sci-fi movies to get great response from the movie lovers all over the world. And some leading render farms can do a great favor for achieving their hardworking and efforts. As one field of CGI, render farms providing with render farm service are always the essential factor for movie production and other production, no matter the 3D movies, animations, sci-fi movies or advertisement production etc.

In effect, Fox Renderfarm with vray render farm is the render farm can help them achieve their efforts and their artists’ creation to be realized, as it is equipped with the top-level hardware specs. We are not a production company, that is to say, the production companies all over the world can benefit from the rendering services we offer. It is the point for us to try our best to make contributions to the development of CG technology.