Today, movie effects are mostly done in CGI, especially if they’re of the death-defying type. [Tyler Bell] shows us how they shot actors with arrows before CGI.
Almost every medieval movie has someone getting shot with an arrow, but how do you do that non-destructively? [Bell] shows us two primary methods that were used, the pop up rig and steel pronged arrows. The pop up rig is a spring loaded device with one end of an arrow attached that pops up when a mechanism is triggered. [Bell] 3D printed his own version of the mechanism and shows us how it can be used to great effect on shots from the side or rear of the victim.
But what about straight on shots where the rig would be blatantly obvious? That’s when you get to actually shoot the actor (or their stunt double anyway). To do this safely, actors would wear wooden body armor under their costumes and arrows with two small prongs would be shot along a wire into the desired impact site. We appreciate [Bell] using a mannequin for testing before letting his brother shoot him with an arrow. That’s definitely the next level above a trust fall.
We even get a look at using air cannons to launch arrow storms at the end which is particularly epic. Looking for more movie magic? How about the effects from King Kong or Flight of the Navigator?
Thanks to [Xerxes3rd] on Discord for the tip!
It’s a bit wild just how tame 150 arrows fired at once looks. Google suggests that the English army at the battle of Agincourt had about 5,000 archers, so one volley of arrows would be about 30 times as many as he’s firing. That’s either a lot denser or covering a lot wider area than he manages, but not both.
considering how much space five thousand archers would need to just plant their feet and maneuver their bows in, i’m thinking their volley’s more likely covering a larger area. even if they’re somehow all firing at the same one target, there’s probably a limit to how dense the arrows can get in practice.
A germane article for me as I recently picked up a book at a Hamfest called ‘SPECIAL EFFECTS in Motion Pictures’ by Frank P. Clark of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Inc., published 1962. If this HaD article interests you then this 238 page book covers in detail how they did all this sort of movie magic in the days before CGI. For instance, special arrow guns, and knife guns with rectangular barrels and so on.
That’s one of the most interesting and informative articles I’ve ever seen here.
Thanks, hackaday!
Love it! Years ago I worked on a show where two characters tussle over a desk and the one underneath grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed the other in the back… I made a similar system to the pop up arrow but with half a set of scissors out of a modified mouse trap that would fling the scissors up into a vertical position through a slit in the actors jacket.. we then added a blood pack and the other actor learnt to slide the scissors they picked up out of sight…. rewarding to hear the audience gasps!
I remember a skit in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In where a dying archer instructed his friend to bury him where the arrow he was about to shoot lands.
So, he shoots the arrow upward and a pop up arrow appears in his chest!
The gag was partially lost because I saw the arrow pop up from his abdomen.
Here’s an interesting story. Someone set out to convert a Technicolor scene of the Battle of Agincourt to modern color film. When it was shot Technicolor used a four-strip process. One strip each for cyan, magenta, and yellow. They also added a fourth strip with black outlines because the Technicolor color printing process at that time did not produce very sharp color edges. In conversion they didn’t use the black strip because modern color film did not have this problem. When they didn’t know was they the EFX folks had used the black strip for the clouds of airborne arrows. The surprise result was the Battle of Agincourt without the clouds of arrows. Ooooops!
Battle of Agincourt without clouds of arrows? I’m sure the French would approve.
I feel like this posting missed the opportunity for Skyrim’s “took an arrow to the knee” reference.
I guess the author doesn’t get to the cloud district very often.
The arrow with prongs on a monofilament gives me an idea, taser bow.
I was the VFX supervisor on the first ‘300’ movie, and just about all the arrwos were CGI. The spears were another story, as (generally) a spear is held by one human and and must convincingly impact another. This is complicated by the fact that a spear will indent clothing or skin when it hits. The special effects department had made telescopic spears so the attacker could keep pushing and the spear would puck into the he so as not to actually kill the other actor. This kinda worked, but the strength of the prop was severely compromised by the small area of overlap between the two parts of the spear. Visually this needed to be small to leave penty of room for the pointy end to disappear into the handle.
In a bit of cooperation betweer VFX and SFX, i came up with the idea to make a spear with much more travel by allowing the butt-end of the sliding part to actually pop out the back of the sleeve. The advantage was that this would increase travel and max penetration, the compromise was that someone would have to paint out the butt-end of the spear( if you even noticed the trick) . Since people are generally watching the business end of a pointy spear,any shortcomings of the paint-out would be less of a deal. It worked pretty well.
This didn’t solve our blood problem- liquid blood is a huge pain- you as soon as you start using it, youre looking at costume changes after ever take, and wardrobe departments are not generally funded to have dozens of outfits for every actor. And you risk embarrassing continuity errors whenever you use actual liquid blood. So the burden fel on VFX to make it work. We ended up shooting stills of ink blots splashed on paper and tnen digitally manipulating them in post in order to keep shooting moving and save the sets and wardrobe from blood spatters. There’s a cool compilation that someone made with a couple seqments about these and other VFX issues here : https://youtu.be/v–r6XKICks?si=IFE3Sahq8XbdR6cV
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