Swiss Army Man - The combination of visual and practical effects.
This week film club's movie was Swiss Army Man, and we were asked to tell which ones were practical effects and which ones were visual effects. It might seem easy, but when we think something is made in the computer, think it twice because many effects were practical instead of visual. The movie is not a high budget movie but it has enough budget to manage some VFX. The list goes like this:
VFX was very little and probably difficult to notice for people not working in the industry. The man, Manny that is suppose to be dead, never blinks, and of course, why would a dead man blink. But the character did blink so they have to mask out every blink from the movie. A little too much for something many people is not going to notice, but they wanted it to be realistic. Another VFX is the matte painting of the island. They didn't travel to deserted island just to film a couple of seconds, they mostly used matte paintings. A little bit gross but the dead man use to fart a lot, and many of the fart where exaggerated so those were VFX.
SFX took a bigger place in the movie. Many of the effects where practical instead of visual. For example, the bear in the end of the movie, most people would say is CGI, but the truth is there was a real bear on set. This was way cheaper than recreating an actual bear in post. Also the part of the moving dick, many thought it was cgi but there was an actual robot on his pants that would move with a control. Last, they used what's called a "stuffie" which is actually a real size teddy bear of a human, for most of the scenes where he had to carry the dead body.
The movie itself is a great example of the combination of VFX AND SFX, and by using both there are millions of possibilities.
Now talking about the movie, I would give it a solid 9.0. Yeah it was not realistic but the story itself and how the mind can play with us is great and for being a medium budget movie it was not bad at all.
