What is your favorite surreal shot from a movie?

My favorite surreal shot is from "Never Ending"

Can amazing visual effects be created even without using dazzling CG technology? Of course, "Never Ending" is such a film. This movie, co-starring "The Hangover" handsome man Bradley Cooper and veteran movie star Robert De Niro, tells a suspenseful story caused by a magical drug. The magical lens language is refreshing. This article will invite two companies, Look Effects and Comen VFX, to discuss their use of virtual telephoto lenses and other fascinating special effects in movies to see how they completed this "latest realism full of fantastic virtual effects." "Masterpiece".

The magical opening of traveling through New York

The film uses a flashback technique. The opening shot shows Eddie on the streets of New York, venting his emotions about his impending death. The camera falls from the side of the building to the windshield of a street taxi, and then shows the traffic flow through the streets of New York from the perspective of the taxi, going back and forth and finally landing on the protagonist Eddie. The zoom photography of the city blocks was completed by Comen VFX. Visual effects supervisor Tim Carras said: "Director Neil showed us many related types of zoom shooting. Under the conditions of grand scale, you will see more details."

Except for sliding down from the side of the building for filming, almost no other CG technology was used in the entire series of shots. Most of them used three cameras combined with high-definition materials to express the zoom. Carras explains, “This also allows us to take wider angles and zoom digitally until we get the best resolution. We’ll move to a mid-angle shot and continue to progress into close-ups until the scene transitions into the next Block after block. Technology like this helped us complete the shooting and production of block after block.”

The 85-second opening credits were shot using Nuke. Carras said: "We worked a little bit on the focal length of the exponential-based camera to ensure that it was consistent with the speed of the entire series, and the focal length doubled every 28 frames. We first had a camera that maintained a stable shooting speed , and added a slider to it to ensure that we can slowly reduce the speed - this is also determined by the excessive speed of the initial sudden drop to the street, in order to allow the lens to return to a smooth speed during the transition. , we inserted nearly 100 frames of footage."

The long shot of "Infinite Zoom"

This is the most visually stimulating and representative shot in the movie. Eddie Morra had just taken medicine and had unlimited energy. As if everything in the world was at his fingertips, he spread his legs and ran around New York City. Dan Schrecker, Visual Effects Supervisor at Look Effects, used photography techniques to help realize this conceptual telephoto shot through early consultation, and created a series of post-production drug stimulation shots. Everything was shot in 4k using short, medium and long shots in three-camera editing mode. The camera follows Eddie as he runs and travels, from the nightclub to the Brooklyn Bridge, reflecting Eddie's confusion about time and space through the "infinite magnification" of the screen.

Schrecker explained, "Using the RED camera unit allows you to shoot high-resolution images, which is why we can achieve longer lenses. We connect the images according to the corresponding proportions, and the cameras do not shoot in one place. There are angle changes in the area because everything has to be zoomed in. Before integrating the RED unit, lens testing for zoom photography was done on a Canon 5Ds. Professionals use the lighting device on the tripod to freely and easily adjust the position to find the shooting point, so that the speed and proportion of the final zoom photography can reach an appropriate point.

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