myDylarama

7 Activist documentaries available for free

Abla Kandalaft — 2025-10-16T16:33:34Z

The UCLA Film Archive just announced that 7 activist documentaries that are now freely available to access and stream for students, academics, and others. This update was shared through the Radical Film Network, thanks to Pr John T. Caldwell.

He writes: "This online collection is from a recent retrospective of my films that the UCLA Archive featured at the LA Hammer Museum last Fall. Now, all of these experimental documentaries and ethnographic films (made between 1983 and 2020) are available freely for classroom, area studies, or community use at the Film Archive's public Vimeo site."

These films primarily focus on immigration politics, migrant labour, indigenous organizing, and extractive economies in the U.S. and Central America.

The films deal with themese like ICE deportations, indegenous "migrant camps" and labour organising, as well as "reverse immigration” away from the “fortress America" U.S. of the late 1980s (“Freak Street: The Migratory Patterns of Hippies”, 1989); labor organizing by a local SoCal union community that broke the transnational corporate extraction economy of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto (“Boron Lockout”, 2012); the national economic erasure of indigenous practices and identities (the Managalase Communities of Papua New Guinea in “Kuije Kanan”, 1984); and, an unfortunate precursor to the current political theater and staged media “war” against Venezuelan “drug cartels" in 2025 (i.e., the Reagan-Contra war against the Sandinistas, that exploited the indigenous Afro-Caribbean Miskitu people from Nicaragua depicted in “Personas Desplazadas", 1983)."

The films from the Border Wars collection can be accessed here.

Films of Resistance: A Night of Shorts

Zhaleh Bahraini — 2024-07-17T20:43:17Z

Films of Resistance: A Night of Shorts was held at the Genesis cinema in London. The programme of Palestinian shorts was put together by the newly created Films of Resistance initiative, backed by magazine Culturala. This was Films of Resistance's first screening and was by all accounts a resounding success, practically selling out the 500 seater screening room. The initiative works as a sort of decentralised collective who share and screen Palestinian films. The screenings' proceeds go directly to supportive filmmaking efforts on the ground: firstly, by purchasing and sending practical equipment to the Jenin Culture Centre to train the next generation of filmmakers, and secondly by allocating specific funds and support to individual directors who are in various stages of developing their short films, with the help of a board of experienced industry professionals. Anyone in the world can organise their own screening by getting in touch with the Films of Resistance team.

The films shown were:

- An Orange from Jaffa (2023) by Mohammed Almughanni

– One Minute (2015) by Dina Naser

– The Silent Protest (2019) by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin

– Bethlehem 2001 (2020) by Ibrahim Handal

– 120 KM (2021) by Waseem Khair

The normal reactions in An Orange from Jaffa shown by the protagonists to the daily challenges and to the extraordinary and awful circumstances they face really brings home the reality of what living with checkpoints is like for those that are forced to go through them. There's humour in Mohammed's frustrated calls to his worried mother, and tension in Farouk's jeopardy. We're all at the edge of our seats. We are left on this edge but offered an orange from Jaffa as a moment of sweetness to cleanse our palate for a short moment of joy. We're reminded that Palestinians, and those living in the impossible circumstances of occupied territories, are held to the same standard as free people: they are forced to try to function as if they are not impeded by huge systematic infrastructure, reinforced with brute force. This depiction is made all the more engaging in the simple setting of the car, while likely an economic and practical decision on behalf of the filmmaker, it allowed us an intimate glimpse into Mohammed and Farouk's interactions.

Time is often slowed in films, but one minute felt as short as it no doubt feels to all those who have had a message like the one in One Minute. Set during an Israeli-imposed power outage and relentless bombing, based on the 2014 Israeli massacre in the Shujaiya refugee camp, this film is set entirely in the dark with the only glimpses of light coming from the character's phone. The darkness, withholding the character's face, accompanied by rolling text messages rich with humour and crisp sound was beautiful. This cinematographic choice was also very effective, and delivered the expected punch. It felt like we were presented with a snapshot of one person's experience of the massacre, one real person we empathise with, whose anguish is multiplied a hundredfold across all the residents of Shujaiya and the rest of Gaza beyond. The darkness of the screen felt like sensory deprivation that heightened the rest of our senses, and allowed us to engage directly with the characters. Without a clear physical depiction, we are less inclined to ask ‘are they like me?', or ‘are they like us', which is human nature, and therefore, less inclined to distance ourselves from their circumstances and their choices.

The Silent Protest makes me think of Soraida: a Palestinian woman. Soraida shows us how she resists, in her actions, reactions, choices, and her simply existing unapologetically. The history depicted here immediately sparked a question Soraida posed: “Is this the time to rally for women's rights when no one has rights?”. The Silent Protest's answer is a resounding yes because these issues are intertwined, they feed each other and dismantling one supports the dismantling of another, and gives way to justice. Mahasen takes us through the women's movement against the British Mandate's anti-Arab bias in 1929. It shows us how they tried to prevent what they foresaw, which was the beginning something ugly that was snowballing and was going to become a devastating avalanche if not stopped.

If I were to find fault, it would be that I wish it had been more gripping. However, I don't know that I can ask that of a personal and important re-creation and body of research? I am more inclined to feel grateful for the window the film offers into the actions of the indigenous people of Palestine when they witnessed the the beginnings of occupation, and how they mobilised.

Bethlehem 2001 has an exciting premise that sends many of us tumbling through the depths of our memories to recall our own past in the spirit of Ibrahim's character. While the context is occupied Palestine, themes around accessing our earlier memories as adults to try and piece together our childhood, make sense of our traumas and reflect on how we saw our parents then versus now, are universal and timeless. Ibrahim's film is still fresh, slow and really holds your attention as we journey together through memories.

Waseem travels 120 KM on an artistic tour of Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. “For 70 years these people haven't seen their country, don't we owe them 2 years of our lives?”; this is Waseem, a Palestinian living in Occupied Palestine, talking about Palestinians of the 1948 Nakba, living as refugees in Beirut and missing the home that Waseem has come from to bring to them. He refers to the possible 2 years' imprisonment he faces at the hands of Israel for embarking on this trip. Waseem is refreshingly honest with us, the audience. He is at ease while clearly aching as he sits amongst his kin, sorry that he gets to go home while they can't. It's shocking to see Waseem, a Palestinian filmmaker who will in fact be jailed upon returning to Occupied Palestine for making this very documentary, express guilt for being able to go back to his occupied homeland. He's shaken by the reality of Palestinian lives 120km away, outside of the system of occupation but as perpetual refugees. To Waseem, he is privileged in comparison because he still lives at home, whether occupied or not.

The programme sparks hope in resistance, and does well to show its audiences, whoever and wherever they are, that Palestinian people dare to exist and dare to keep making art.

Talking Spectacles - Airplane!, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula

Judy Harris — 2024-04-23T06:57:58Z

I spoke to film critic and stand up comedian Nick Bartlett about the Karl Strauss technique in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the mirror gag in Airplane! and the old school effects used to create the beautifully macabre world of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

1. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

I love the transformation scenes in An American Werewolf in London and The Howling but this scene beats even those. It's a POV shot where we see Dr. Jekyll (Fredric March) transform into Mr Hyde. They put red makeup on him and lit him using rotating red and green filters which changed the contours of his face - it's a technique invented by the cinematographer Karl Strauss. It's an optical illusion, using the camera as you would in a magic trick. It's truly unnerving because this trick, combined with his performance, means he really looks like he's transforming. Sh! The Octopus also used this technique and does it even more dramatically and creepily but this is a better film overall.

2. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
I tried to choose just one scene but it's the effects throughout the whole film that combine to create an eerie, uncanny world. It's full of time lapses, reverse motion, rear projection, painted mattes and forced perspectives. It has a really odd atmosphere, and the artifice is part of that. There are shadows that move independently, a coachman's arm that appears creepily long and all the vampires move with an awkward, unnatural gait. Coppola used techniques from the early 1900s and hardly any CGI at all. In the same way that today the strength of many silent films is how they look rather than the acting, here the performances aren't great (save Hopkins and Oldman) but visually it's stunning.

3. Airplane! (1980)
This is a small but brilliant moment. Robert Stack's character is adjusting his uniform in front of a mirror and suddenly he steps out of the mirror and walks toward the camera. It's a Marx brothers Duck Soup moment with the false mirror – a moment of wait, what? Some other scenes have a double in the foreground but not here. It's such a throwaway joke and I just love that. They had to go to the effort of creating another set just for this joke. If you read up about Airplane! apparently Robert Stack was one of the guys who didn't get what the film was trying to do, he just played it straight and that adds to the silliness of him doing this surreal gag. Edgar Wright is someone who is really good at visual jokes like the Texas switch etc and I wish more people did this. I love prosthetics but that can age a film and so can CGI. But these visual in-camera tricks are timeless, they don't date.

Talking Spectacles - Matt Houlihan

Judy Harris — 2024-03-03T19:26:31Z

In the first instalment of Talking Spectacles I spoke to Matt Houlihan from The Garden Cinema about the drooling aliens of Alien, Event Horizon's gothic spaceships and the wonderfully absurd animatronics of The Thing.

Alien - This is essentially a haunted house film since it's set in an enclosed space where people are faced with a malign presence. My favourite scene is where Harry Dean Stanton sees the alien for the first time. The way it's introduced is so clever, you don't see it enter fully, you just see its head. There's a real economy to it. So much of the let-down of horror films happens when you see too much, you can see it's a guy in a rubber suit, but here the way it's lit and shot means your imagination has to make up for a lack of visual information. It's a beautiful yet terrifying sight as it comes down, it glistens like it's covered in KY jelly, drooling and so organic - very visceral. And this glistening being is juxtaposed with the grubby, working-class environment where workers are engaged in industrial disputes. It's a gothic, cavernous, dirty space and within it is a real H.R. Giger biomechanical, sexual creature. The way it looks encapsulates the themes the film touches on - the terrors of motherhood, birth and sexual violence. I watched it when I was way too young – I think I was 8 but maybe younger. You can forget how revolutionary it is.

Event Horizon – This is another haunted house film, set on a possessed ship which is like a gothic cathedral. The ship itself is the antagonist, it has an alien feel to it, but it also radiates cold, hard indifference. Rather than only using vxf they combined them with 30 miniatures of different scales and that materiality is what brings it to life. It's such a leap of imagination to be in that place that you need a sense of the hardware. One of the models was incredibly detailed and 30 metres long, but it looks like it goes on for miles. You can see the mastery of the craftsmanship and the direction – the use of shadow and how it's shot creates a powerful, haunted atmosphere. And, as in all these examples, it's how the visual effects work with the sound effects and the score work to create a brutal, ghostly environment. It's like the Marie Celeste ghost story of a ship that disappears and comes back.

The Thing – This is a great film with incredible animatronics that look organic. It's another haunted house film where people are being stalked by something they can't see. What I really like is its absurdity, it's so extreme and comical at times. In the famous defibrillation scene the shape-shifting Thing is found to be a giant mouth within a character's chest that bites the Dr's arms off and then transforms into a spindly, spidery creature scuttling around. It's so bizarre but believable in the context of the film and there's a marvellous level of detail. It all works together including the script – when it scurries across the room in its new form someone says ‘you've gotta be fucking kidding' and it breaks the tension and horror so delightfully, it's a real cherry on top. The film is really smart in the way it straddles the line between horror and comedy because there is inherent comedy in the extremity of it.

Celebrating World VFX Day - Chris Lumb

Judy Harris — 2023-12-08T18:59:25Z

In our final instalment for World VFX day we spoke to comedian and old school effects fan Chris Lumb about the library ghost from Ghostbusters and the face melting scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Ghostbusters - library ghost (Ivan Reitman, 1984)
EEG
When I about 7yrs old I saw Ghostbusters at the cinema with my brother and was totally blown away by this jump scare at the start, screaming at me. It's terrifying! I love the way she shushes them first and then instantly changes, she bursts out into the screen. It's totally unexpected that this little old lady turns into this demon. Blending comedy with the frights isn't easy to do but all the gags work in this film. I love old school effects because there's a certain grittiness to them and you have to be more imaginative with them. It strengthens what you're doing because it impacts how you shoot things, it makes you more innovative in every way. You can watch a version with no sfx on the 4k blu-ray, it's fascinating to see the process of how they put it together.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – opening the ark (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1981)
ILM
I'm a big 80s film fan especially because of how they merged everything together, the practical and the digital. I love the bit where the three men's faces come off. You've got the exploding one in the middle, the one whose face gets sucked in and the one whose face just melts off. This wasn't funny when I first saw it, I had to fast forward this bit, I just couldn't stomach it. I watched the behind the scenes footage and the guy whose face melts off had layers and layers of clay and paint and all that on him so it would look gruesome. The reason why the first one explodes with a wall of flame in front him is to soften the impact of the explosion because it was too violent.

Chris's show Prequel, Sequel, Requel where comedians have to pitch a sequel, a prequel and a requel in one minute can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeivwdqP5FM

World VFX day is an annual day of recognition in celebration of the vfx industry (and the often invisible labour of vfx workers) started by a collective of visual effects studios. Anyone in or outside the industry are encouraged to take part. Sign up to the ‘World VFX Day' newsletter for the latest news and events: https://mailchi.mp/651b2a6c2ad9/world-vfx-day

Thanks to everyone who took part in our World VFX day series, it's been really fun!

Celebrating World VFX Day - Sam Hall, ILM

Judy Harris — 2023-12-08T13:04:21Z

Happy World VFX Day! We spoke with Sam Hall, actor and Senior Research and Development Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) about the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park, Pixar's anthropomorphic Blue Umbrella and rendering black holes in Interstellar.

Jurassic Park - T-Rex reveal (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)
ILM and Stan Winston Studios

The cool thing about this scene is that less is more. The T-Rex has been teased throughout the film so they've built the tension leading up to the full reveal of this giant monster. Now, this is the early 90s and VFX was in its infancy so they're technically quite limited with what they can do and there's a real danger of it looking fake, but they lit it in a way that is shiny and specularly with lots of edge lighting, so it holds up even now. They worked within their limitations and lit it in way that works with the technology that they had. It's also a good scene in terms of its composition, you get a sense of the T-Rex's scale, weight and bulk. As a kid this was one of my favourite films and it was definitely very thrilling and scary.

The Blue Umbrella (Dir. Saschka Unseld, 2013)
Pixar

This is my favourite Pixar short because it illustrates Pixar's ethos of anthropomorphism. It opens on an urban street with lots of inanimate objects and they very subtly bring emotion to gutters and road signs by partially animating them. It's very cute and clever. They really can bring character, heart and emotion to anything and make you deeply care about pair of umbrellas in just 6 minutes.

Interstellar - into the black hole (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014)
DNEG

This is a cool film technically. In this scene the main characters are pulled into a black hole and DNEG (the VFX company) worked with astrophysicist Professor Kip Thorne to accurately render how light would behave as it approaches a black hole. They made a rendering engine based on his advice (as in, they wrote software that models how the light would be affected by the gravitational pull). There's also something called an accretion disc which is created when gas and dust from other objects get pulled into the black hole and that was all physically recreated by using these equations. I think it took about 100 hours per frame to render. At first when they looked at the images they thought they looked totally wrong but then Professor Thorne confirmed that's exactly how it would look. As well as being technically brilliant the scene makes you face how small we are. It really throws you off and puts you in an unknown place.

World VFX Day - Tom Salinsky

Judy Harris — 2023-12-08T07:42:38Z

Happy World VFX Day! There's nothing more special than special effects.

Whether digital or practical, special effects are created by a highly skilled, specialised labour force and have created some of cinema's most captivating images (that's why we insist on calling them SPECIAL effects). In support of the effects industry and to celebrate the first World VFX day we spoke with a random collection of people who work in and/or love sfx and asked them to share some of their favourite sequences.

Writer and podcaster Tom Salinsky spoke with us about puppet plant life in Little Shop of Horrors, stepping into the Technicolour world of Oz in The Wizard of Oz and the massive hole in Goldie Hawn's torso in Death Becomes Her.

Little Shop of Horrors - Audrey II grows in its coffee can (Dir. Frank Oz, 1986)
Associates & Ferren

This film takes place in a heightened reality. You have to believe not just that people burst into song but that there's a plant that lives on blood. This is a turning point in the plot where Rick Moranis's character starts wondering what kind of plant this is. It's a crucial moment and they take their time over it. She snaps at him and he begins to figure her out – it's the first time that Audrey II becomes a character. She starts growing and it looks like she physically swells. To get the effect they took a larger puppet from a following scene which was twice the size and slid it toward the camera. This effect is so easy and so brilliant. Some people don't want to know how this kind of magic is done, but it never spoils my enjoyment. Nothing diminishes how joyful this film is for me, no matter how much I know about how it was made.

The Wizard Of Oz – Dorothy enters Oz (Dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)

This scene is also a turning point in the film and the execution is simpler than you might imagine. The first 20 minutes or so are set in the sepia world of Kansas and then there's all the tornado craziness and then it all stops. Dorothy has been living in this drab world dreaming of travelling over the rainbow and here she enters the most colourful world you can imagine. Making that transition with a cut would have been unsatisfying. Instead, they filmed the scene with a colour camera, painted the inside of the house grey and had a stand in for Judy Garland wearing a grey dress. The stand in opens the door and then, seamlessly, Judy Garland in her blue and white dress walks through it and we move with her out into the Technicolour world. As a technique it's akin to the cowboy switch where a stunt actor ducks out of sight and the real actor pops up in their place. What's most powerful with special effects is when they serve the plot, they're a magic trick in service of the story and that's what happens here.

Death Becomes Her – Goldie Hawn gets out of the pool (Dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1992)
ILM

The reason I picked the pool scene rather than Meryl Streep's backwards head is that you can see how hard the head effect is to pull off, but Goldie Hawn's hole in her torso has an ease to it despite being so technically difficult. They created a CG hole which was mapped onto her and then a dummy torso for the water to pour out of and stitched it all together seamlessly which is really impressive given the technology was so new – this is 1992 when digital effects were being used in a naturalistic way for the first time. Some effects are just spectacles to show off the technology – they're divorced from the plot but here the story, effects and the comedy all come together. This is a black comedy and the tone is crucial – you need to believe in their suffering but still find it funny. Her injury had to have a cartoonish element but it also needed to be an extreme injury and a round hole in the stomach is perfect – it's extreme enough but not too gory. They included shots of her body that they didn't need to, but it's not gratuitous, it adds the to the scene by continually reminding you she has suffered what should be a fatal injury, but which mysteriously isn't.

Tom Salinsky co-hosts the film podcast Best Pick, find episodes and more here https://bestpickpod.com

Celebrating SFX - Eddie French

Judy Harris — 2023-12-07T14:01:39Z

In our third post in the run up to World VFX day tomorrow we're talking about sfx legends Ray Harryhausen and Eugen Schüfftan, as well as the sparing use of CGI in Mad Max: Fury Road with non-binary comedian, film nerd and podcaster Eddie French!

Jason and The Argonauts – Talos scene (Dir. Don Chaffey, 1963)
Ray Harryhausen
Of course I love all of Harryhausen's stuff. I would've looked like the ultimate hipster if I'd chosen The Valley of Gwangi, though that is also excellent (I mean it's dinosaurs and cowboys!). But this scene with Talos is so visceral. Harryhausen is just so good! The scale of the status of Talos is astonishing - he moves slowly and yes you can run away but he can just take one massive stride and grab you. When they defeat him the human actors are interacting with a physical model but it blends so well, the leg and foot are identical to the tiny stop motion figure. It's nigh on seamless even in high definition! In The Valley of Gwangi there are three cowboys played by real actors who lassoo a stop motion dinosaur. It's that bringing together of models and humans that Harryahusen did so beautifully, he could blend all these different elements into the same world. The harpes scene is also great and it has Patrick Troughten in it, who is the second Dr.

Mad Max: Fury Road (Dir, George Miller, 2015)
Iloura
This film is just one big car chase - it feels like a road runner cartoon, it's relentless. Everything is done practically and all of the CG is in the background. They've got all these stunt people swinging around on bamboo style poles etc but the background is this waste land done with CG and it reminded me of The Lord of the Rings films – the reason they (mostly) look really good is that everything is real and they just sprinkle CG over the top like fairy dust. It still holds up the way other films made just with green screen don't. They use CG sparingly and it blends so much more easily – not like when actors are talking to a tennis ball on a stick. The palette of the film is incredible. Most of the CG is used to illuminate bits of lore like the sandstorms and poisonous, murky, foggy places – it's using CG for wordless world-building. Almost everything in the foreground is real and then the background is CG.

Metropolis – flooding scene (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927)
Eugen Schüfftan
I'm assuming that health and safety was more lax back then and that's why they could get away with drenching hundreds of children in water in this disaster effect scene (what Katharina Loew calls a naturalistic spectacular effect). The whole of Metropolis is enormous in scale and the destruction is incredible. This scene is very anxiety producing. Even though you assume that there probably won't be hundreds of drowned children at the end, you still feel tense and afraid. The place never looks like someone is pushing a tonka truck around – this isn't a Hot Wheels set, it feels massive and convincing. A special effect can live or die depending on how it's edited and this film really gets it right. This flood scene is one of the only times you see something natural in the film – it's for the pleasure of the elite in their luxurious garden or with this flood. They've tried to harness nature in order to exploit it and, as we know, that is what will kill your children. We didn't listen!

You can find out more about Eddie French, including their NOFX podcast here: http://www.eddiethefrench.com

Celebrating SFX - Abdel Belabbes

Judy Harris — 2023-12-06T11:06:39Z

In the second instalment of our VFX series we're exploring the merging of CGI and stop motion in Robocop 2, Guillermo del Toro's penchant for insectoids as evidenced in Pacific Rim and the mercurial appendages of Dr Octopus in Spiderman 2, all selected by sfx fan Abdel Belabbes.

Robocop 2 (Dir. Ivin Kershner, 1990)
Phil Tippett

One of the coolest things in VFX is when different techniques are married together and this scene has a great transition from live action to stop motion which manages to maintain its momentum. It happens as Robocop is getting ready to attack his enemy Cain - we see him in wide shot preparing to jump onto him and when the jump happens it transitions to a stop motion figure of Robocop on his back, but the momentum is sustained as the two figures start tussling together. Also, the jitteriness of the stop motion isn't off-putting because it fits with our image of how mechanical figures move. Phil Tippett perfected the craft of stop motion. Every time you think of stop motion in film you think of him and this scene shows how great he is.

Pacific Rim (Dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2013)

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)
This is a silly movie but I love it. This entire suit up sequence is brilliant as it's another marriage of practical effects and GGI that sells a larger effect. This scene also shows the role that production design has in helping stage larger visual effects sequences. Del Toro is a master of production design; his films have an earthy fairytale quality, an industrial chic. I love a good set up and here the two pilots are getting suited up to pilot a massive robot. The best shot is where there is a spine attachment that the riggers attach to the pilots with a wriggling insectoid part which presumably attaches to their spines. Del Toro has an affinity for anthropods and insect parts and even in this moment of manmade, high-tech wizardry you find a centipede kind of creature. It adds to the creepy fairytale aspect and sells the marriage between organic and mechanical – a literal bridging between the machine and the human.

Spiderman 2 (Dir. Sam Raimi, 2004)

I was wary of choosing this film because we're saturated with superhero movies and Marvel movies. The Marvel films get a lot of flack for overworking visual effects houses and they often end up with inferior results, but this film shows what happens when you prioritise effects. I think this film has some references to Raimi's horror roots, specifically The Evil Dead. This sequence is of Dr Octopus who, in the first half of the film has been presented as a sincere father figure, but this scene changes that as he becomes a Universal style monster. It's a horrific sequence. I think that a lot of CGI undersells the threat of a villain, but this scene sets up Dr Octopus as absolutely formidable! His arms are supposed to be mercurial and snake like yet also heavy and mechanical and it works. The animal like noises add to it too with the roaring and hissing. The arms become characters as well as appendages. The editing works great to bring together puppetry, animation and POV shots. It feels like it's all happening in the same space.

Thanks to 'cinema Gremlin' Abdel Belabbes for speaking with me about VFX. May he never get wet or eat anything after midnight.

Celebrating SFX - Eddy Durnan

Judy Harris — 2023-12-05T12:52:03Z

There's nothing more special than special effects!

Whether digital or practical, special effects are created by a highly skilled, specialised labour force and have created some of cinema's most captivating images (that's why we insist on calling them SPECIAL effects). In support of the effects industry and to celebrate World VFX Day on Dec 8th we spoke with a random collection of people who work in and/or love sfx and asked them to share some of their favourite sequences, starting with visual effects insider Eddy Durnan.

NB: Eddy hasn't seen a film made before 1989.

1) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - The Holdo Manoeuvre (Dir. Rian Johnson, 2017)
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)

This is a stunning, largely silent scene which is very sad but incredibly beautiful. It's pretty monochromatic, there's not much colour and there's a discrepancy between the rapid motion of light across the screen and the slow motion of the debris. It's low key yet breathtaking. The effects supervisor said he wanted the collision to cut “like a hot knife through butter”. That's what's fascinating about vfx, someone can come up with a concept like that and a team of people can make it happen. It's bittersweet because while Vice - Admiral Holdo dies, her death gives us this spectacular scene. I guess that's all that matters really.

2) Terminator 2: Judgement Day – Fire and Ice Scene (Dir. James Cameron, 1991)

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Stan Winston Studio, Fantasy II Film Effects, and 4-Ward Productions.
Additional effects from Pacific Data Images and Video Images.

I love this scene because of how brilliantly the practical and digital effects are integrated. It's effortless but you can still feel that combination of something virtual and something tangible, though it's hard to pinpoint how and where that happens. It's a spectacle in itself but also serves a purpose in the story and I like it when visual effects and plot support each other. I love the gradual metamorphosis of the freezing sequence but the best bit is when the liquid metal starts to take form, it looks incredible, especially the reflections of the fire. Yet the camera work and the composition of the shot mean the spectacle is completely integrated into the scene.

3) Life (Dir. Daniel Espinosa, 2017)

DNEG, Industrial Light & Magic, NVIZIBLE, One of Us, Outpost VFX and Atomic Fiction

This is a hopeful, wonderous opening to what becomes quite a scary film. It's an immersive scene which gives a visceral feeling of weightlessness and serenity. The camera movement is amazing, it floats you through the space station seamlessly even though it's actually 17 takes stitched together. At one point you can see earth through the space station window and it just looks so beautiful. It connects the audience to what the characters must be feeling and places you within the film but it also gives you such a strong sense of wonder and awe in a timeless, transcendental way.

Thanks to Eddy Durnan for taking time out of his lunch hour to talk to us. We're posting conversations about sfx all week in the run up to World VFX Day Dec 8th.