Film technology lightsaber

In the raw film, the actors seem to be fighting each other with colored brooms instead of laser swords. The special effects artist's job now is to turn these broomsticks into real laser swords. The special effects artist shows the frame-by-frame images of the film, then projects each frame onto a special plastic film with a laser sword for animation, and then draws the outline of the laser sword on these films. Then draw the correct color of the blade with different bright cartoon pigments in each frame. Finally, the special effects artist got a stack of these films, each of which corresponds to the corresponding image of a laser sword in the film. Each film only has the image of the laser sword, and the other parts are transparent.

Now we're going to make plastic films into films. When shooting, each plastic film is placed in front of a black background, and a light diffuser is placed in front of the camera lens to make the laser sword look radiant. If you play this movie, you can only see laser blades dancing on a black background. After that, the original film was shot by secondary exposure. The new movie Laser Sword looks radiant and lifelike!

When the film enters the digital age, the process of making the laser sword seems a little simple, but it is still very complicated. With digital technology, people can scan every movie image into the computer at a very high resolution, so that they can operate on the computer screen. In order to make the laser sword look more realistic, the special effects artist has to sketch the outline, fill the color and render the effect frame by frame on the computer screen. The difference is that the original works on plastic film are transferred to computer memory and spliced by digital means. The workload of the special effects artist has not been reduced too much, and the creation still needs to be carried out frame by frame.